Ferreting out political and historical truth from the welter of partisan voices and official disinformation, so far as this is possible, is no easy task. Not many of us are capable or desirous of doing so. This is perhaps the major debit in a prosperous democratic polity, many of whose citizens, like pampered children, have grown spoiled and lazy.

Common sense is needed, along with moral fortitude and the willingness to dig for documentary sources and artifacts that are not easily falsified. One cannot allow the media to do one’s homework for one but must instead subject what one is told to believe to hard scrutiny and diligent research. This process is not only an epistemic necessity but also a moral demand. As C2C editor Patrick Keeney writes, “we can only arrive at what we ought to do by appeals to moral reasoning.” We might say that thoughtfulness is an aspect of moral character.

In the political world especially, one must be skeptical of the left and its popular sobriquet, socialism. For socialism is all about radical egalitarianism, the expansion of welfare dependency, the destruction of the nuclear family and the establishment of single-party rule. The study of history and the current geopolitical theater is dispositive in this regard.

Opponents of the Left are regularly denounced as belonging to the “far right.” But what is called the “far right” in the current political environment is a will o’ the wisp, a false construct serving the interests of the demagogic impulse associated with the left, for there is no temporizing with the left’s totalitarian basis no matter how moderate it may appear in some of its presumably acceptable forms.

What is condemned as the “far right” is actually responsible conservatism struggling to preserve the philosophy and tradition of “classical liberalism” associated with resonant names like John Locke, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Disraeli, and today with Richard Weaver, James Burnham, Robert Bork, Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton.

For those on the “soft left,” desire is the nub of the issue -- the appetite for outcomes in the absence of reasoned analysis and knowledge of history, justified by a faulty reading of the world. One recalls the philosophical debate that raged for centuries between Duns Scotus and his followers on the one side and the school of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the other. (The word “dunce” derives from “Duns.”) Scotus postulated that the will conditions the reason, in other words, desire seeks its goal first and the mind subsequently proceeds to vindicate its decision. Aquinas contended that reason commands the will, that is, the faculty of purified intellect posits the good, and desire afterwards strives to achieve it. The general run of leftists and liberals are, on this interpretation, earnest neo-Scotists, wanting something very badly -- feminist hegemony, climate purity, socialist equity, sexual license, abortion on demand -- and then abusing their mental powers to defend their error.

For the “hard left,” however, affective attitudes are somewhat different. Desire is not a function of the will to believe -- since many inhabitants of that malignant political universe are fully aware of their corruption and duplicity, and like criminal psychopaths glorify it -- but, quite bluntly, of the will to power, as we have seen in the fraudulent election of 2020.

The Democrat party is by any honest assessment no longer a political party but a criminal organization intent on dominating, suppressing and extorting an entire nation. It has accepted a Marxist philosophy and enforced it by fascist means, deriving theory and practice from the Communists and the Nazis, becoming, in effect, the NaziCom Party of the United States. And in collaboration with the nation’s “elites” -- academics, media, the technocrats, the Hollywood syndrome, corporate shills, and affluent outriders -- the NaziComs seem poised to succeed in imposing their destructive agenda.

One thinks of Abraham’s argument with God in Genesis 18. Must the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah be utterly destroyed for their wickedness? “Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks the Lord, who agrees to spare the “twin cities” if only ten righteous men could be found. Not even ten could be found and the cities were consumed in fire and brimstone. Though the analogy does not hold point for point, it is nevertheless instructive. In America there are millions upon millions of good and decent people -- people who have not grown slack and indolent and ungrateful -- and it seems a mortifying shame that the they should be politically, socially and economically destroyed by some of the most contemptible people on the face of the planet.

Obama boasted that he would “radically transform” the United States, and the left is determined to execute his mandate, transforming the country into a modern iteration of Sodom and Gomorrah. Any fair and reasonable analysis of the November 3 debacle tells us without the slightest doubt that the electoral process was a sordid and unscrupulous affair carried out by the Democrats and their myrmidons -- that is, by the institutional (or “hard”) left with the complicity of revolutionary youth and a “soft” electorate.

The cadres of billionaire plutocrats and the petty tyrants of the political left can count on the approval of the decadent and feminized moieties, which is why these must be resisted by the “righteous” -- ordinary men and women who do honest labor and cherish their friends and families as they do their freedom -- with all the means at their disposal. And they must resolutely support President Trump, who in his battle to ensure electoral legitimacy and preserve the integrity of the nation, has come to resemble a tragic hero fighting inestimable odds.

Graphic credit: Daveblog  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

David Solway’s most recent book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House, London, 2019.