I haven’t had much time to blog in the aftermath of our mid-term elections, in part because where I teach, Lee University, has just dedicated our new engineering building, and I’ve been busy supporting that effort. You can see that dedication ceremony below.
I’ve not been a very prolific poster on this site, especially with political matters. There’s a reason for that: just about everything I have to say I’ve already said, sometimes 15-20 years ago. Our thought processes as Americans is simply too constrained by tradition to look at our situation differently.
In any case, I’ll go back to my 2021 post Some Reflections on “The Ten Weeks” and Our Current Situation. I had the good taste/divine guidance to post this novel around the time of January 6, which kept me out of the fights over that sad event. It concerns the impact of a country called Verecunda which in 1968 had elected its own left-wing president named Allan Kendall. At the time it seemed that we had reached our own similar moment, but at the time I cautioned everyone that this might not work out the way its proponents planned:
Having said that, I think that the U.S. has come to its “Allan Kendall” moment. There are two important differences. The first is that it’s come to this moment without an Allan Kendall. That I think is a big part of why the left freaked out over Donald Trump. They know that they don’t have a Lenin to counter a Kornilov; they don’t have a Mao Tse-Tung to counter a Chiang Kai-Shek; they don’t have a Castro to counter a Batista. They’re more like an Azaña against a Franco, and we all know how that ended. So they freak out when a strong person comes against them. Their best hope is to lean on our tech oligarchy to deplatform their opponents, and although intra-oligarchy fights are not unknown to the left (Nicaragua comes to mind, although that type of struggle occupies the novel as well) it’s not the best way to bring power or justice to the people.
And that leads to the second question: why did it take so long? The Ten Weeks is set in 1970-1, and not a few of us in that era thought that they would roll on to triumph. It would have been easier because they had a populace who was more used to obeying the government rather than endlessly challenging it. I think the critical moment came in the wake of Watergate: the left largely squandered the moment that followed, both through laziness and electing a President who was neither invested in the revolution nor motivated by the desire to right past personal wrongs. The economy went into chaos, the Boomers went into their spectacular volte-face, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It certainly didn’t work as desired. In spite of the fact that his minions had free run to implement their agenda, Biden was too mentally feeble to lead such an effort. When this could not be hidden, the Democrats botched the follow-up with Kamala Harris, a weak candidate who was rolled by their nemesis, Donald Trump.
If there’s an analogy of a year past for 2026, it’s 1974. As noted above, the left botched that golden moment (is there a pattern here?) This time, however, they have a populace, strung out on credit and imbued with an entitlement mentality, which has no stomach for things that just might make us safer. But ultimately they still have the same problem I noted six years ago: they don’t have a strong leader to really shut their opposition down.
A lot of that is preference of their ideology; a strong leader goes against their fear of domination by one man. Opposing them is a party which is obsessed by the concept of leadership, which is one reason why most Republican primaries end up with everyone in the state/district on the ballot. It also explains why they’ve stuck with Trump for so long.
As for me, my position for a response hasn’t changed in the intervening six years:
So, as always, we are left with Lenin’s question: what is to be done? For the participants of The Ten Weeks who were on the wrong end of the national outcome, the answer was simple: leave. If I were the age of those participants now, I would be making preparations to do the same. In fact, I considered doing just that back in the day. Getting Americans to consider that is hard; most are not prepared for that, either in their style or mind or their skills to make a living. But if the regulatory and legal web about to be weaved turns making a living and worshiping God into an ordeal, things might look very different.
And they well could.
