Americans must seize the initiative

In Tom Sowell’s recent article on the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, he showed, as always, that he is too rational, honest and truly careful of the future of our county to offer his compatriots comfort in delusion.  He sees neither of these candidates as fit for the Presidency.  He is as faithful to reason in dealing with politics, as he is when he discusses economics or sociology. So, Dr. Sowell refuses to pretend that he does not see through what I call “the Trump Mirage.”  So do I.

Dr. Sowell fears  that Trump’s deficiencies increase the risk of a nuclear holocaust.  However,  the “nuclear holocaust” I most apprehend is the dissolution of the God-endowed natural family system.  For the natural family is the nuclear reactor that, rightly configured, produces individuals whose confident energy comes of faith in the love of God, as that love has been shared with them by caring parents. The productivity of the family contributes to the common good of their society precisely because, starting with decent parents, the members of the natural family are disposed to work hard for the sake of others, not just their own.

In the ongoing elitist faction war against the sovereignty of the American people, the offensive under way against the family is the most likely to prove fatal.  Court decisions like Obergefell, and anti-Constitutional edicts like Obama’s lawless executive order to coerce people to abandon their decent respect for the male/female distinction, are WMD’s in this political assault.  Both so-called “major Parties” are now controlled by forces that are party to it in one way or another.  Bad candidates are the fruit of those bad trees. It’s long past time for people concerned with the nation’s survival to abandon them.

Is that a “desperate choice”?  Or would it give reason to hope that Americans are still capable of reclaiming true self-government, true liberty.  I have encountered, I keep encountering, many Americans who give evidence of being the sort of people whose faith and courage befits that hope.  Therefore, I cannot conclude that we have become a people unfit for liberty.  We have politicians unfit for liberty; Parties unfit for liberty; Candidates unfit for liberty. or even national survival.  But I do not despair of our people, especially not on account of the fact they they spend so much time without “looking up from their electronic devices.”

Unlike Donald Trump, many Americans do not think it wasteful to fight for the cause of liberty and right, knowing that they themselves may never win.  Like America’s sung and unsung patriots and pioneers, they are willing to live in the God-inspired hope that their compatriots and their posterity will be inspired to benefit from their example.  Not content with pleasing themselves, they are willing to live to please the Author and Creator of all things, whose Christ-proved friendship enables all humanity to reach for true victory, if they have the heart to do so.

I do wonder, however, when Americans will begin to wake up to the fact that today’s electronic devices have the potential to help them realize, as never before, the vision of self-government America’s Founders’ had in mind.  I do wonder when America’s republican patriots will realize this potential. Precisely on account of the new opportunities for self-started grassroots mobilization these devices represent, discarding a party system hijacked by the enemies of our God-endowed rights, including liberty, is not a desperate choice.  It is in fact the choice required to revitalize our liberty by seizing the opportunity 21^st Century technology creates.

Can you Imagine a Presidential election in which there are no self-serving, narcissistic, ambition mad and money manipulated candidates; an election in which people “more concerned about the fate of this country” than about any partisan label or ambition, look to select, from amongst themselves, fit persons they know and trust to search out and select the President and Vice-President of the United States?

In such a truly Constitutional Presidential election, the only campaigns would be in states and localities, among competing visions of the common good, applied to the challenges of the day.  Would-be candidates, anxious to show their capacity for service, would have to prove it by supporting what the people themselves devise.  They would not demand that people support them.  Instead they would have to let their performance in support of what the people devise and initiate speak for their sincere attachment to the public good.

This is what should take place in the aspect of the election of President and Vice-President that occurs during the General Election. Don’t take my word for it.  Instead, wipe all thoughts of the current corrupt Party system from your mind, and read the Constitution’s provisions for the actual election of President and Vice-President.  Read it thoughtfully and with care. You’ll see that  the office of elector is the only one to be filled in  the General Election. Only candidates for elector, not candidates for President and Vice-President, are actually subject to the vote.

Once selected, only those chosen to be electors have the Constitutional power to decide who is to occupy the chief executive offices. The present Party system is an extra-Constitutional overlay, a contrivance now used to camouflage the fact that an elitist clique has, de facto, defeated the Constitution’s aim of assuring that the best judgment of the people would be ably represented in the process of identifying the best candidates for those offices.

If we are to restore the integrity of our Constitutional self-government, respecting the Constitution’s provision for the selection of our nation’s most prominent officials would be a good place to start.  But, given the present shabby condition of our political process, what would it take to do that?” you ask.  It will take your initiative; Your willingness to find out what is required, by the laws in your State, to field an independent slate of candidates for Elector, candidates who make no binding pledge to vote for any particular person.  To be sure, given the present arrangements in every State, the unified commitment of the Electors on the slate would have to be represented by the name of some favorite son or daughter on the ballot.

But the solemn oath that all the candidates for Elector on the slate would take would be to search diligently for the best persons to occupy the chief executive offices of the United States government, and in that effort to apply, in good faith and to the best of their ability, a statement of principles and specific guidelines, agreed upon by the voters themselves, who signified that agreement by the votes they cast for the slate committed to that statement.

This way of proceeding would restore the Constitutional integrity of the electoral process. The present partisan travesty has turned our elections into a plebiscite to legitimize tyranny.  Voters are perforce compelled to choose among candidates the elitist faction’s powers-that-be admit into the process only if they show themselves willing to comply with that faction’s tyrannical intentions for the use of the offices they will occupy.

The Constitutionally respectable process would focus on selecting effective representatives of the voters, who would swear to adhere to principles, aims and goals agreed upon by the voters, and to seek out and select, from among the whole people of the United States, the best candidates they can find to carry out the duties of the offices in question in accordance with the voters’ vision.

This is what the Constitution actually envisages.  When they first emerged, this sworn allegiance to what was then properly called a platform was the substantiating premise for organizing the electoral competition. Representation was the goal, and victory meant victory for the voters’ sense of what would serve the common good. Now, as Phyllis Schlafly recently said, candidates have nothing to do with the “platforms” of the sham elitist faction parties.  Those platforms are for propaganda purposes only. They are used to manipulate and deceive voters at election time, then assiduously, indeed almost proudly ignored when governmental decisions are taken.

To restore the integrity of the political process, and its true purpose of representation, requires the initiative of the people themselves.  There is nothing to re-present if the people do not present it in the first place.  Therefore, no individual person or candidate should be the focus of the political process.  It must be the people themselves. They must gather themselves to focus upon the common good of their community, their state, their country.  If Americans have forgotten how to seize the initiative in their own citizen lives, that is indeed fatal proof that we have become incapable of sustaining our Constitutional Republic.  As Thomas Sowell said, that prospect is grim indeed.

So, stop looking for leaders and dare to take the lead.  Break free of the spell of lying con artists, sporting promises of “greatness” or a government guaranteed easy life for all.  Theodore Roosevelt got it right.  Liberty is not easy.  It is challenging, rugged, exhausting work. People looking for a break; a quick buck; a short circuit to “greatness”, will find themselves quickly subdued and effectively enslaved.

Instead, we must look within ourselves for the great faith, the great courage and the great good sense and will that has been the true excellence of our country since it first began, even in the days when the world despised it as a backward and deserted wilderness.  The world was wrong.  Looking forward now, it may seem to some that we are headed into the wilderness again- but we can prove them wrong, provided we still remember what it means to be the pioneers of decent human liberty, which is to say—Americans.