With the presidential election just three weeks away, I’m reading and rereading the Declaration of Independence, for reassurance and inspiration. Fear drives me to do so. It’s cliché every four years to say that a presidential contest is “critical.” So let’s not say that. Let’s say it’s decisive, a pivot-point, this year. We’re at one of those rare historical junctures.

The left and its establishment go-alongs are feeling their oats. They sniff that a victory for Hillary in November seals fates – theirs beneficially. The fates of us Deplorables, well, we’ll either submit or be ground into submission. We’ll either bend a knee to the cabal that runs Washington or be forced to our knees. They’ll define our freedoms and rights.   

Under Obama, the national government isn’t just growing in the old liberal way. What’s hatching is tyranny, Marx inspired and leftist directed. It’s been incubating for years, to be sure. It’s been covert in its approach -- masked as forms of rights and within the American experience. But with Obama, the nascent tyrants are emboldened.

We can only hope and pray that Donald Trump is elected on November 8. If this was baseball, Trump’s election makes him the stopper -- you know, the relief pitcher who comes in with the bases loaded to shutdown the other team. Then a Trump presidency becomes our turn at bat. That’s when we have to score runs -- lots of them -- to rally to win the game.

Okay, so it’s not that easy. A four- or even eight-year Trump presidency can’t possibly undo decades of Washington’s vast overreach and impositions. But certainly Trump can do much to take back Washington for us. There’s the power of the purse, executive orders, and legislation (stand aside, Paul Ryan). It would be heartening to see Attorney General Rudy Giuliani clean house at the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and EPA, among other corrupted departments and agencies. What’s meant here is pursuing indictments of appointed officials (recent past and present) and bureaucrats. Better lawyer up, Director Comey.  

Of course, there are more than just the dangers posed by Washington. During the Reagan years and afterwards, the left -- shrewdly and with renewed vigor -- more deeply infiltrated schools, the news media, and popular culture. The culture today is more suffused with doctrinaire leftist sensibilities (and huge helpings of decadences for deconstruction purposes). Ditto key institutions. Political correctness is a tool designed for domination. Our side must develop smarter, more comprehensive approaches to either take back the culture and institutions or offer compelling alternatives to the status quo. In fact, recapturing the culture isn’t optional.

The passage I most often mull from the Declaration is:      

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

At this moment in time, we needn’t take the passage literally. We don’t aim to abolish the national government; but we can freely commit to “abolishing the forms” Washington has taken, which have and are creating a “long train of abuses and usurpations”… egregious abuses and usurpations by Democrats, the left, and establishment cohorts geared to reducing us “under [modern] absolute despotism.”

It is, indeed, our right, our duty, to cast off the present form of government, to recreate the nation, leading it back toward founding principles… to “provide for new Guards,” in the present and for the future. That’s a prodigious undertaking, fraught with great conflict and perils. Sacrifices and costs are attendant. Trump alone cannot accomplish this. His leadership must be supplemented by broader swaths of activists from many different walks of life.   

Envision a nation in the grips of the statist Democratic Party.

What happens to speech -- conservative media, yes, but your speech, which, in effect, even now is censored by PC sensibilities? When -- not if -- those leftist sensibilities are transformed into tough laws, prepare yourself for prosecutions, selectively, at least, to instill general fear and self-censorship.

Faith and religion, will they not be under greater siege? Hasn’t the largely agnostic -- increasingly militant atheistic -- left through Obama attempted to make the Catholic Church submit to its contraception and abortion policies? Consider that a mere feint. A more thoroughly entrenched Democratic Party in Washington will aggressively press churches (not just Catholic) to submit or withdraw from the public square, effectively marginalizing faith. What does Hillary’s campaign chair, John Podesta, and Clinton ally Sandy Newman, mean when they talk about creating a revolution in the Catholic Church? They mean to subvert the Church to subordinate it to the state.    

You? You will practice your faith in your church and home; expressions of faith outside your church’s precincts and, more significantly, acting on the teachings of your faith will be punished. You refuse to provide a service for a gay wedding? Expect civil rights violation charges coming your way. You’ll lose everything Washington can take, including for a time your freedom.

The right to bear arms? Rumors swirl now that President Hillary Clinton will issue an executive order to undercut your 2nd Amendment rights. This might be the most immediately incendiary action by Hillary. The wager here is that the Clintons -- Bill acts as Hillary’s consigliore -- appreciate that a sweeping executive action would spark a firestorm. So they’d do what Democrats and the left have done for ages, boil the frog; in other words, remove your right to bear arms over a longer timeframe, and coordinate with Obama- and Hillary-appointed federal judges to do more of the dirty work. 

We are increasingly a divided people. The divisions have long been in the making, certainly since the 1960s. The cleavages aren’t as neat and clean as pro- or anti-slavery, North versus South. There’s a multiplicity of important issues today where Americans are in conflict; where beliefs, values, and even virtues are being contested. The statist left has willed this… has, in fact, exacerbated differences and promoted clashes. There’s little, if anything, in traditional America that the left wishes to uphold. The left, embodied in the Democratic Party, hates America. That’s difficult for many Americans to grasp. But that’s the case.

As with slavery, the matter of the nation’s future -- free or statist -- won’t be a matter of splitting differences, compromises crafted in the hope that accommodations win fellowship and peace. Either liberty or statism prevails. The nation’s future belongs to one or the other.

Let’s borrow one last time from the Declaration:

[F]or the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

And our votes this November for Donald Trump. Let’s begin the revolution to retake our liberty then.