At last it is over. No more campaign ads to pollute the airwaves and cyberspace. The yards signs are quietly gathered, sometimes in dejection and disgust; sometimes with relish and a side of schadenfreude. Whichever side of the partisan divide be your lot, there must at least be some shared relief in the simple fact that it is over. There is an wholly unhealthy expenditure of energy from both sides. I get it, but still the sustained siege mentality is a cancer upon both body and spirit. As this is so true for the individual can we possibly deny that it likewise be true for us, as a people?
There are the joyful victors and the embittered vanquished. In other words, the same as every other election. Despite that undeniable truth, there is also no point in denying that this round had a sense of desperation attached to it. In a mathematical perspective this is actually quite curious. It appears that once the counting is done there will have been 141 million votes cast in this Presidential election. Out of approximately 265 million voter eligible. They told us that in 2020 there were 156 million votes cast. If this one was so urgent where did those other 15 million voters go? I think that is an entirely reasonable question and one which deserves an answer. A truthful answer.
In a stable republic the order of business now would be to move forward. Move forward with our lives and with the business of the country. We are not, sadly, a stable republic. I think that a majority of Americans would agree that we are a republic that is teetering upon the edge of collapse. Not the country, for it is likely to survive in one form or another. It is the republic that is at risk of collapse. Some might say that is hyperbolic. I don't believe it is any more hyperbolic to say than the persistent mantra from democrat campaigns that this election was a struggle to "save our democracy". They are guilty, at the least, of a poor choice of wording. What they are trying to express is the desire to preserve the democratic process, which is of course the means by which the citizen participates in a republic. Perhaps that mis-wording is deliberate as a means of manipulative wordplay, but I'll avoid that rabbit hole for now.
The ideal of the republic, versus the "pure" democracy, is to temper the impulse of abuses that are inherent to the tyranny of the majority. For any seeking clarification of the term "tyranny of the majority", I would refer you to the brilliant work of William Golding, Lord of the flies. The ideal of a republic is not to determine equity; it is instead designed to preserve equal protection of and before the laws to which all are bound. This must be the cornerstone to any functioning republic. What we have instead is what Frank Zappa sagely observed: a land of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced. I might take the liberty here to edit that observation, to say that they are poorly written and selectively enforced.
The leaders elected by the people to administer the republic are entrusted, indeed they even take an oath of office, to defend and uphold the laws of the land for all citizens of the republic. This includes the 120+ million who did not vote for either candidate and the 70 odd million who are not voter eligible. If you're counting I'll save you the time. That 190-200 million people are well over half of the population. So while 73-75 million votes and 300+ in an electoral college tally may well constitute a landslide election, it does not constitute a true mandate. There has been no true mandate in a US election since the 19th century. I imagine that there are a host of other theories as to why there is this failure of participation, but here is mine. It is no more complicated than over half of the country sees the federal government only as a taker: there is no net benefit in it's existence.
For most who have exercised their franchise with regularity there must come a sobering admission. Seldom, if ever, was an affirmative vote cast. That is to say that in most cases a vote is cast not for a candidate, rather they have been votes cast against the alternative. Any voter who tries to tell you different is a liar, or they have been drinking too much Koolaid. Donald J. Trump, love him or hate him, has utterly crushed this paradigm. The democrats could have run Robocop as their candidate and the results would have ended the same. The people turned out as much for Trump as against Harris. It did not help at all that she is utterly unlikable.
In order for us to move on to the business of the country there are two things that must happen. There must first be a reckoning, followed by a reconciliation. One may not have one without the other, for neither is of any worth without it's companion. No reconciliation can occur until the reckoning is complete. On paper these are only words, but in reality these are both challenging tasks. They will not come without effort. The reckoning must come in several forms, but most important of these, the truth must be told.
After the Nazi surrender in 1945 the Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was appointed as the Governor General of the western zone of occupied Germany. He was given the daunting task of simultaneously working to restore a functioning society while also expunging the Nazi influence from same. Even before President Truman issued a very detailed program for the administration in October 1945, Eisenhower had already made it a policy to confront the German people with the enormity of the Nazi regime's crimes. It was not too long into this process of de-nazification that a sobering discovery was made. The tentacles of this totalitarian regime were so far reaching into German society that the complete removal of each and every Nazi would result in the nation simply left huddling in the rubble.
The American administration in post-war Germany was not spotless in it's execution, but Eisenhower was a man eminently suited to the task. He had a firm grasp of the broader vision of the policy while deftly navigating the tactical challenges on the ground. He fully understood that they were dealing with a people who had known only a dysfunctional, ersatz republic, followed by twelve years of totalitarian, one party rule and total warfare. This great intellectual race had spawned genius in countless disciplines of both art and science, yet in only a generation had been so awash in state propaganda as to have lost their ability to think critically for themselves. Eisenhower was convinced that it would take a full generation for this to be corrected.
I am going to share with you a couple of lines excerpted from Eisenhower's correspondence with a Master Sergeant Meccner, stationed at Wright Field, 9 March 1946:
fr. paragraph 2 - "In general our policy on German re-education is founded on the concept that re-education must ultimately come from Germans themselves..."....we can not forcibly re-indoctrinate the Germans if we are to obtain the desired results."
fr. paragraph 4 - "This program does not simply concern itself with German educational institutions in the narrower sense, but is to a large degree concerned with the media of public information in Germany such as the press, radio, film industry, and similar means of contacting large groups."
I believe that these lines best encapsulate Eisenhower's thorough understanding of the nature of the problem and how to best address it. The Nuremberg Trials were the reckoning. Eisenhower's longer term administration (and that of his successors) were the reconciliation.
A reckoning is an event. A reconciliation is a process. It is not my intent to draw a full equivalence between the current state of America and that of Germany at the end of the war. There are nevertheless great similarities in a social sense. Eisenhower recognized that all of the institutions of German society had been tainted with the poison of Nazi ideology to one degree or another. It was only by continually placing the truth before the people that they might accept it by their own conclusion. While the results in our case are nowhere near as catastrophic, there is indeed an overwhelming body of evidence to show that there is a similar infection of our own institutions. The poison in our body politic is cultural Marxism, that Frankfurt School cocktail that is manifest in the many colors of the rainbow. It has many labels, but it is all the same poison. It has, like a virus, infiltrated it's host and weakened it to a degree that it may be subsumed by a perverted version of it's former self: a Mutant Republic.
There are clear crimes that have been committed by our political class. While the clear majority of the offenders are members of the democrat party, they do not hold sole province over criminality. The numbers of malefactors and enablers with the parenthetic "r" next to their titles have done a yeoman's work for their part. They are all complicit; by commission or omission; by aiding and abetting; by colluding and conspiring; by any acts committed meant to thwart the legally exercised will of the electorate. In a healthy republic this betrayal constitutes the highest order of crime. It is an unforgivable transgression, one that if forgiven, assures a republic forever compromised and vulnerable to collapse at the least provocation. The guilty must be fully exposed and held to account. There must be a reckoning for any reconciliation to occur.
I myself am of the opinion, as are many other of my countrymen, that something of an order of a Nuremberg II should take place, under the protocols of a military tribunal. While others are certainly welcome to cling to that fervent hope, I for one do not foresee this happening. Despite the desire for such trials, one must temper this wish with one bitter reality. As a highlight of his parting act resident Biden will be quite generous with the pardoning pen. This may not pose an insurmountable barrier against prosecution, but no less a weighty shield with which to make a lengthy and formidable contest. Imagine the colossal spectacle if the defendants in the first Nuremberg trials had the benefit of a sympathetic judge banked away in some federal appeals court? So the truth, my friends, is that any attempt at such a resolution would result in a circus of media sharks in a blood frenzy, circling the whirlpool of their vanishing empire. That scenario ultimately benefits only the smug class of pricks responsible for this Mutant Republic.
But there is another way...
It has been reported that those who know Donald Trump well, on a personal level, say that he is not of a vengeful heart. That is someone else's say so, second hand at that, so who can say for sure? If true, then he is a better man than I, for all that he has endured. I believe that the impressive margin of victory does give him, if not a true mandate, then at least the political capital to spend on being magnanimous in victory. That is a luxury he can surely afford. While this may leave those of us with a thirst for blood unsated, it does not mean that the truth will not be told.
Our reckoning must come in nothing other than complete transparency. Don't bother hiring all the prosecutors, drawing up the indictments, seating grand juries or tribunals either one. Just put it all out there, open source for all to see. Expose everything. Let them howl. Let them bring on their blood sucking legions of lawyers. If acting in an official capacity as an officer of government to make public materials that would be subject to any FOIA request, there ain't dick they can do about it. Here is your reckoning. This is how you make them pay, for it is the truth that they fear the most.
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