Many times in the last eight years we have had to endure Barrack Obama’s pontification -- “That is not who we are.” Really? Who are we? The Left has no idea. We -– all human beings -– are not what the Left likes to pretend we are, and therein lies the rub.

This election has turned the spotlight on the vast, wind-swept chasm between Worldview Left and Worldview Right. In the early days of the union people differed as to how much power the federal government needed, but beyond that, they appear to have all started from similar launching pads. While the government power-divide issue still exists, a much bigger dichotomy of assumptions grows ever more blatant -- assumptions about the nature of truth and the nature of man.

Team Left bases all its philosophical conclusions on the conjectures that absolute truth is utterly nonexistent, and that human beings are basically good. The first is a silly, self-refuting statement and the second requires the wearing of serious blinders – we do not behave as if we’re morally responsible, loving beings. 

Team Right, spinning off our nation’s Christian beginnings, sees Truth as a foundational, capital-letter concept and that Truth includes divine moral standards. Also, leaning back on biblical basics, the Right sees man as 1) made in the image of God and therefore valuable, but 2) fallen and therefore not to be trusted to live by the Truth that we so seriously value. The Right relies on common sense.

The walloping the Left took this election has been hard for them to handle, not because liberals were in love with Hillary, but because their most basal ideas just got kicked in the philosophical ribs; they’ve had the breath knocked out of them.

Being a leftist requires a huge amount of imagination and wishful thinking. One has to believe, in one’s heart of hearts, that society is to blame for man’s foul habits. We human beings, if as righteous as they believe we all are, would not rob and kill and rape and lie unless something extraneous drove us to it, so society takes the blame, never mind the fact that said society is made up of these badly behaving, yet “perfect” creatures.

Social organization is to blame, essentially for itself, which is an untenable thought, so the Leftist must believe that it’s possible to change that organization -- if enough people decide to “change the world”, then utopia is in sight. Right? It has to be.

If we pass enough laws everyone will obey. If we take enough money from the rich, the poor will cease to exist. If we erase boundaries and ignore the differences between nations, there will be no more war. If we pretend that sinful behavior isn’t a choice we make, then we’ve eradicated sin.

However, in order to do that we need massive government –- run by our fellow man, who is still damaged by our less-than-perfect social environment, but who will, nevertheless, have life-or-death power over us all, and will ring in a Brave New World.

In order to extract enough money from the rich, we have to 1) define down “rich” until it covers even those in the middle class –- there aren’t enough of the  truly wealthy to do the job -- and 2) convince the “rich” that they want to keep working despite the fact that the money they earn will go to others they neither know nor love, to others who do not work. This gets us back to oppressive governing techniques.

If we plan on avoiding war by playing nicey-nice with sworn enemies, we will have to embark on a dangerous mission of tiptoeing around atrocities and getting used to being attacked. If we pretend that sexual promiscuity, homosexual practices, and pederasty are not sinful then we have close our eyes to the dissolution of the family (which does destroy societies), damaged psyches, and rampant sexually transmitted diseases. If we think we can run a tidy community whilst lying to each other about everything important, we have no way to organize commerce, no way to maintain friendships, no way to choose those who will govern us.

Since all this is really hard to accomplish, we have to take one more step: we have to change the language. That way if we fail to wipe out poverty, we can still talk like we succeeded. If we run up against implacable enemies, we can just quit calling them enemies. We can change the meaning of “marriage,” narrow the definition of “racism,” and twist “tolerance” into forced acceptance.  But this gets us right back to government again.

Team Right, relying on God and common sense, studies history, observes our fellow man and realizes that nothing can be built on a lie. We call a spade a spade and we like others who do – hence Trump’s popularity. We know we are all self-interested and likely to take that too far. We can admit that, without standards, we run amuck, but we only trust God to determine what those standards will be. We also know that God has given us all intelligence and ingenuity and the ability to work and that, given adequate freedom and encouragement, we will do a fabulous job of taking care of ourselves.

Team Left, having killed off God with their stance on Truth, has no common standards, no greater purpose, no One to rely on besides the government they’ve built out of smoke and mirrors, so liberals will defend their “leaders” with irrational fury. Their governmental betters are all that stands between them and the awful truth (pardon the expression) that they have been very wrong about some very important things.

This election -- and even more, the coming Trump administration -- will prove the error of their most basic assumptions. Just as the discoveries of the Intelligent Design scientists has given their Darwinian colleagues a bad case of the vapors, Donald Trump is going to poke huge holes in the hot air balloons of socialism, hedonism, and pacifism.

We, all of us, are imperfect and will, Truth be told, need to look out for ourselves. It’s not just that Trump won, but that this election also shined a light on the inevitable corruption of a government built on two serious misunderstandings. The Left does not know who we are, preferring the make-believe version of human nature to the obvious truth, but this election taught me that much of America has still got it right -- Truth is truth and man is flawed. The opposite of right isn’t left; the opposite of right is wrong.

Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com and is a writing and speech professor at Pacific Bible College in Southern Oregon.