Trump, The Meaning of Redemption

Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference - WSJ:

Satan is "the accuser" -- he abhors actual freedom. He seeks to enslave the soul to constantly justify itself -- to "pull itself up by it's own bootstraps", thus becoming ever more lost.

Here, in this instance of profound hypocrisy, began the idea of America as a victimizing nation. And then came the inevitable corollary: the nation’s moral indebtedness to its former victims: blacks especially but all other put-upon peoples as well.

This indebtedness became a cultural imperative, what Styron might call a “transforming circumstance.” Today America must honor this indebtedness or lose much of its moral authority and legitimacy as a democracy. America must show itself redeemed of its oppressive past.

America was founded on ideas -- and VALUES, the highest in the the history of the world save those of Jesus. Indeed, it was founded on the values of Christ -- that ALL were equally endowed with the opportunity for redemption.

But America was a human creation -- like the Church. It was imperfect, and in the eyes of Satan and his followers, imperfection means you are NOT redeemed! You are a hypocrite for claiming high values but failing to live up to them fully! Thus you stand ACCUSED, unless you abandon your values.

So imperfection is to be accused and held against all who fail to follow the Satanic authority. The only hope for redemption is WORKS!

How to do this? In a word: deference. Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies. Since then deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one’s innocence of the American past. Deference is, above all else, an apology.

This is a very good policy if you can set yourself up as the arbiter of proper deference -- as the left wing culture increasingly has. The greater the need to pay deference (penance), the greater their power -- thus a never ending stream from women to blacks to gays to transgenders to Muslims to ???. It is like the Scribes and Pharisees or the pre-Reformation Catholic Church -- being under the law of PC is a gift that keeps on giving to the ruling elite who defines what is and is not proper penance.

Since the ’60s the Democratic Party, and liberalism generally, have thrived on the power of deference. When Hillary Clinton speaks of a “basket of deplorables,“ she follows with a basket of isms and phobias—racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamaphobia. Each ism and phobia is an opportunity for her to show deference toward a victimized group and to cast herself as America’s redeemer. And, by implication, conservatism is bereft of deference.Donald Trump supporters are cast as small grudging people, as haters who blindly love America and long for its exclusionary past. Against this she is the very archetype of American redemption. The term “progressive” is code for redemption from a hate-driven America.

The problem with works driven redemption is that it creates it's own form of power structure, a "priesthood" if you will that decides on "the redeemed". So the priests of PC tell us that in order to "atone for the sins of America", we must live in slavery to political correctness, and they will define who is and is not "redeemed"  -- but we don't like it. The part built into our souls that yearns for Christ, grace, and true freedom knows that we are being misled.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life. We resent it, yet for the most part we at least tolerate its demands. But it means that we live in a society that is ever willing to cast judgment on us, to shame us in the name of a politics we don’t really believe in. It means our decency requires a degree of self-betrayal.

But self-betrayal is not freedom, and worse, it instills the "soft bigotry of low expectations" against many groups in our nation -- FOREVER. We rob other humans of their personal power with our conviction that we must "fix them" to redeem ourselves, and the elite are happy to sell us indulgences and pad their "foundations".

After all, the problem with deference is that it is never more than superficial. We are polite. We don’t offend. But we don’t ever transform people either. Out of deference we refuse to ask those we seek to help to be primarily responsible for their own advancement. Yet only this level of responsibility transforms people, no matter past or even present injustice. Some 3,000 shootings in Chicago this year alone is the result of deference camouflaging a lapse of personal responsibility with empty claims of systemic racism.

The BRIGHTEST item in Trumps acceptance speech was that he seeks to "invest in the inner cities". **IF** he were able to bring back some of the trillions parked overseas due to our high corporate taxes, invest in our inner cites and allow them to regain their personal power as full responsible citizens, he has the chance to improbably become the greatest president since Reagan -- or even greater. I agree this a BIG "if", but it IS possible!

Societies, like individuals, have intuitions. Donald Trump is an intuition. At least on the level of symbol, maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference—if not as a liberator then possibly as a reformer. Possibly he could lift the word responsibility out of its somnambulant stigmatization as a judgmental and bigoted request to make of people. This, added to a fundamental respect for the capacity of people to lift themselves up, could go a long way toward a fairer and better America.

 The priesthood of PC took a major hit last night -- let's pray that the tide can be turned!

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