Posted by
Kevin Condon on Sunday, August 29, 2010 12:00:00 AM
I was raised Irish-Catholic, Urban Democrat. My family is pretty self-reliant, though, and proud of our country and our freedoms. I left the Democrat party with Jimmy Carter, ineffectual and weak. Since then, I've voted Republican for a few cycles, comfortably. However, I am beginning to realize that government is getting waaaaaay too big and parental, from the efforts of both parties and the bureaucracies they have built. Ayn Rand leaves me a little too cold to be drawn to Libertarianism. I read broadly and I want to be a good citizen. I know I want less government, I have studied source documents and I know what our founders actually wrote, not how it is presently spun by ideologues. I have become an ardent, devout orthodox Christian, like most of them. I believe that we have wandered off course. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Charles Krauthammer thinks so, too, from different perspectives. Beck and Palin and I believe that without the Judeo-Christian worldview we started with, we're at sea, rudderless. Without our traditional foundation, politics is coming to be about power. It used to be about fulfilling our destiny as a beacon of freedom, founded in godly, moral pursuits, not licentiousness. Honor, valor, courage, commitment, virtue, chivalrousness, patriotism all become fools' words if we can't connect them to the purpose of our society. I also feel the ravages of unprincipled feminism in our culture. I hear the coarse obscenities and whining of narcissists. I see a wasted generation, yearning for higher meaning and purpose, but pursuing pleasure and good feelings. I see American culture slipping away.
So, today, when Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin went to the Lincoln Monument in DC with over 300,000 to pray, I listened and prayed with them. I didn't hear the whole event, just some of Beck's plea for faith, hope and charity and a prayer at the end. However, I believe that God's place in our society needs to be bolstered. We need to aspire again to transcendent ideals, like those of our founders to avoid shuttling back and forth between polarizing ideologies raised to defend one privileged crowd or another in our polarizing society.
The fact that Fox News and the Republican Party are not responding to this event well, yet, is not surprising. This is a true grass roots movement. It is so grassroots that it is alienating to both brands of the ruling elites, from one political pole to the other. Those meeting at the mall today were patriots of all stripes, all with the same concern. What is happening to our America? Let's get back to our roots, but not in the secular version, in the exalted version that we recognized in our founding.
Angelo Codevilla's American Spectator article on the rise of a ruling class in America is active in my mind today. Our Democratic party and our Republican party deny the validity of the America movement approach of today's event. Each pooh-poohs the movement in their own way, not taking it seriously and considering the participants to be rubes. This is a strange trend. Where will it lead. Krauthammer blames the left for its contemptuousness of the grass roots as shown in contemptuous name calling, using the appelation of the most recent issue: Americans are being called racists, homophobic, Islamaphobic, etc. Add to this the "clinging to their guns and bibles" rhetoric of our President, and you see total alienation from the Left. But, to be fair, on the right, too, there is a certain disdainful prejudice. The GOP party elites don't call the grassroots names, but they marginalize or patronize them. They criticize Sarah Palin, damning her with the faintest of praise, while assuming that she cannot represent us, ostensibly because she isn't "one of us". In Palin I see a powerful politician who is constantly underestimated by both parties standing boldly with the people on the Beck stage at the reflecting pool. Lately, when she identifies a candidate she likes, her powerful following blows away an establishment opponent two thirds of the time. I have read her book. I have heard her speak. She electrifies patriots from both parties. She is one of them. Both right and left will do much to make sure Americans do not come to know here better.
How will our two major parties respond to the events of today? Who will seize this moment and attempt to ride the huge wave of power represented by the American movement. Personally, I hope the Republicans respond, showing the courage of the values Beck and Palin espouse. 2010 is theirs to lose. But, if they don't step into the gap, this opportunity is there for someone else to take. Who will it be?