Fight for the Soul of America

The republic that we call the United States of America is entrenched in an existential struggle, not against some external enemy, but against forces that would usurp and destroy from within. The enemy has been singled out and labeled as the Deep State, a seemingly nebulous force embedded across the full spectrum of our society, whose aim seems to be to facilitate the suicide of Western civilization along with its incumbent values, replacing it with some arrangement of higher order in which mankind as a whole rises above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past to become a utopian universal civilization under the guidance of an educated elite whose conclusions are beyond reproach.

So what is the Deep State? And to what is the current administration referring to when it says it is going to drain the swamp? The enemy that seeks to change the American way of life, evidently part of the American landscape since the beginning, has evolved into a two-headed hydra. The twin pillars of the collectivist-progressive-liberal revolution to fundamentally transform America are the administrative state and what has been referred to as the cultural leviathan.

The administrative state has made a very successful intrusion into both political and cultural institutions in America. In the political arena, it's powers are very apparent in the legislative, executive, and judicial realms, powers that can only be described today as illegitimate or “post-constitutional”. Liberal-dominated regulatory agencies and politicized courts make crucial policy while an elected Congress of both parties lacks the will or confidence to confront the takeover from by an ad hoc fourth branch within. Worse, Congress has often even encouraged it.

In the cultural sphere a new sort of “civil religion” has arisen in which Americans are judged not as equal citizens “but by the moral standing established by their group identity.” Under the banner of “diversity”, mainstream liberalism enforces ethnic and gender group rights and political correctness within the major institutions of civil society that progressives control, enforcing a strict ideological-cultural hegemony within the moral-intellectual realm.

The Deep State has grown to dominate the universities, the mainstream media, mainline churches, the entertainment industry, and the HR departments at Fortune 500 companies. Collectively then, Harvard, Yale, CNN, the Episcopal Church, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley make up the onerous cultural leviathan that aligns with the administrative state, dictating within the context of what is politically correct what is acceptable public discourse and what is tolerable or intolerable opinion.

The relentless advance of the administrative state and the cultural leviathan throughout public and private sectors of society presents a confounding dilemma for those who deem themselves conservative. How do you conserve a way of life that holds great value when you perceive it is being attacked and replaced by the dominant streams of culture, politics, and economics all around you in society? A broad swath of the people of this country, likely a majority, have become increasingly alienated within their own homelands. It was a coalition of the alienated that led to the election of Donald J. Trump who ran on an ideology of disruption. Trump gave voice to a growing discontent with the advance of progressivist values in America.

The question remains to be resolved as to how Mr. Trump will restore constitutional values through a disruptive approach. His election has certainly thrown a roadblock in front of the ongoing progressive revolution. His counter-coup is making shocking strides forward towards dislodging modern liberalism from its moral high ground. The commanding heights of the debate are all of a sudden being contested once again. His disruption of the progress advanced during the Obama years has set the Left into a desperate frenzy to effect damage control and remove Trump before he can do further damage.

For over a century conservatives have fought to dismantle the emerging post-constitutional “fourth branch of government”, the administrative state. The new administration's phalanx of deregulation stalwarts is working overtime to render the administrative state less stultifying and more constitutional, sending embedded Obama acolytes packing. Perhaps only by disruption can the advance of the progressive Left be halted and turned around. If this existential war for the soul of America is to be won, it may only occur through the disruption of Donald J. Trump as he works to restore America's economic growth, national security, military, judiciary, world standing, and individual liberty by clearing the swamp of the influence of the administrative state and undoing the rot of the prevailing cultural milieu that surrounds us.