I recently finished Pat Buchanan’s, The Death of the West, and it’s been a fascinating experience reading Buchanan’s thoughts about the dying West with twenty-plus years in the rearview mirror. The book was published in 2002, and the Bush administration was in its early days. Given few of us are Bush fans anymore, you’ll be happy to know he was Hitler too. Of course the left now loves him, and the entire Bush-Cheney cabal, because the Uniparty RINOs are just Democrats in sheep’s clothing. The world Buchanan describes, the 90s and turn-of-the-century America, has all the dynamics of the 2020s, with some of the same faces and a few players no longer around, but all playing the same old game. This was before Obama came on the stage to, “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” which turned out to be leftist hubris on steroids. And remember, as the ancient Greeks taught us, hubris always leads to nemesis.
We conservatives, however, aren’t in danger of hubris because given we’ve been consistently losing for over half a century, pessimism is our gig. Buchanan strongly tends in that direction as well. For the time, however, he was appropriately pessimistic about the chances of the West, and specifically America, escaping the probable death coming upon it from the ascendence of the Marxist left. His subtitle says what will cause its demise, and it may sound familiar: “How Dying populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.” Even for the most pessimistic conservative in the early 2000s, it would have been difficult to fathom the woke destruction heaped on America during the Biden administration, effectively Obama’s third term. What many pessimists failed to grasp is how the left’s success, spiking the football and going into woke overdrive, hubris, was key to their inevitable demise, the judgment of Nemesis. Americans saw something deeply unattractive and harmful in the woke ideology applied on a national level. No lies could paint over the destructive consequences inherent in leftist, culturally Marxist ideology.
Nobody could have predicted this was how the story would play out, America living through the worst woke nightmare until billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump dashed in to save the day. If you would have told conservatives in the Bush years this was how God was going to save America, or at least give it a chance to be re-founded on true constitutional principles, you would have been laughed out of polite society. Many people of a conservative religious bent like me despised Donald Trump. I hated everything I thought he stood for. It took me a while to believe his candidacy wasn’t a joke, just some publicity stunt. Surely, Donald Trump is not a serious man, right? I’ll never forget the first debate with all 16 candidates in the 2016 Republican Primary when Trump ripped Bush and the Iraq War. It made me physically uncomfortable. You just don’t do that! Of course as we know now, there is a lot Trump does you just don’t do.
His entire first term, ending in the stolen election and J6, perfectly played into the pessimistic conservative perspective on the current culture war, including mine. From 1980 and Reagan’s election to January 6, 2021, I was a good little movement conservative, always living with a low grade pessimism as one might live with a low grade fever. You’re not sick but you don’t feel quite right. As a Christian conservative I’d gotten used to losing, to seeing the conservative movement, which I now affectionately call Con Inc., as an enabler of liberalism. A long time ago Con Inc. had stopped living up to Buckley’s ringing declaration when he founded National Review in 1955, to stand athwart history yelling, STOP!!! Over time it turned into, please slow down. The state got bigger and more intrusive, the culture more hostile to Christianity and coarse, and it seemed like that was just the way things would always be, a cultural Berlin Wall that would never come down.
God and the Resurrection of the West
Pat Buchanan may tend to pessimism, but he is not a doomer. I use that word to label the complainers I come across who are always predicting impending doom. They make Chicken Little look like Joel Osteen preaching your best life now. For them, the worst is yet to come. You might get that feeling reading Buchanan, but I’m happy to say his Catholic faith and Christian worldview keeps him from embracing his inner doomer. Toward the end of the book he says:
While none of us may live to see the promised land, victory is assured. For we have it on the highest authority that truth crushed shall rise again.
That is because He who is The Truth became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, died on a Roman cross to redeem the world from the curse of sin, and rose again in victory over death. That is why truth will always ultimately prevail because truth is a person, God himself who created everything, is the ground of everything, and ultimately in control of everything. There are plenty of ups and downs, zigs and zags, two steps forward, three back, but ultimately the direction of history and ultimate destination are in His hands. This Christian view of history has implications for how we interpret events unfolding in front of us. My perceptions changing of our current moment in history as I fully embraced this are a good example of how this works. During Trump’s first term, God was slowly building into me something I didn’t realize until the stolen election, and especially J6, that God was giving us an opportunity to win in what seemed like perpetual losing. As the Sovereign Lord of history He can do that. I no longer saw losing because He was giving us an opportunity in the circumstances to win.
My book Going Back to Find the Way Forward was the result of this budding awareness. Up until Trump’s apparent ignominious end in January 2021, all I could see in losing was, well, losing. Then after the election by God’s grace and providence I found Steve Bannon’s War Room, back then on YouTube. As I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors talked me off the ledge. Bannon, a Catholic, taught me something I should have known all along, but my pessimism blinded me to: God has given us agency, meaning we can change things, and all it takes is, action, action, action! You can’t get much more biblical than that! Bannon is a nationalist populist, as am I now, adding the words Christian conservative to the description. Bannon is the leader of what he calls “The Grassroots Movement.”
For the four years after the stolen election, he would have average, every day Americans on his show exercising their agency to change things, people who take seriously their responsibility of living in a representative republic of “We the people.” Such activists are the greatest fear of the establishment, America’s cultural and political elite, left or right. They represent Americans in general who will not bow the knee to the supposed “experts.” How dare these people know what’s best for their own lives! Which brings us to the historical significance of Trump.
Trump as the Pivot Point in the Resurrection of the West
This would not have been on my bingo card prior to Trump coming down the escalator. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine overcoming conservative inertia and the penchant for losing without Trump. Bannon calls them the controlled opposition, and that’s exactly what they are. As I said above, the conservative movement is an enabler of liberalism, but it’s worse than that. I’ve come to call them liberals in skirts. They are not conservative in any sense of the term, unless you say their job is conserving the liberal, progressive, statist gains of the last hundred plus years. The reason is because of something we now call the “post-World War II consensus” (PWC), a contentious phrase embraced by liberals, including good “conservatives” and despised by populist-nationalists. Against true conservatism, PWC is secularist, globalist, and corporatist. Throw in perpetual war and you have the perfect recipe for a culture war against America and anything truly conservative.
This elite dynamic is the way God ingeniously utilized Trump to undermine it. It’s incredible when you look back on how it all played out, and is still playing out. It wasn’t Trump, mind you, but the reaction to Trump that changed everything. The entire Uniparty elite was exposed for the grift it was. I was initially going to title the book, “Trump the Great Revealer” because that’s exactly what God has used him to do, to reveal the rot and spiritual darkness at the heart of American cultural and political life. Being a developer and builder, Trump turned out to be the guy who pulled the siding off the societal house revealing teaming throngs of termites underneath. God always seems to use unlikely people, as a read through redemptive history in the Bible makes abundantly clear, primarily to make it known: “’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit’ says the Lord Almighty’” (Zech. 4:6). He is the Sovereign Lord of history. This applies not only to the redemptive history revealed in Scripture, but to all history, which is redemptive, God’s plans working in time and among people to His ultimate glorious ends. God has used this most unlikely man to spark a Great Awakening.
This awakening will be nothing like the Great Awakenings of the past, or like the Billy Graham revivals of the 20th century with stadiums full of people walking down the isle to “Just as I Am.” It is happening on multiple levels, and is thus several great awakenings, not just in people’s religious lives. It is cultural, political, economic, health, as well as spiritual. It’s all spiritual anyway because the Christian faith and view of reality is all encompassing, as is any other faith be it secularism, Marxism-Communism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Animism, whatever. The benefit of Christianity over the others is that it happens to be the ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and true human flourishing and blessing can only happen living according to that reality.
Looking at the political angle because that’s where God used Trump the Trigger, and as the pivot point to resurrect it, the perspective change from Con Inc. to Trump was night and day for me. The Uniparty was given its name because most Republicans were effectively Democrats, and “the establishment” has one overarching goal: sustaining their own power. That’s why many Republicans would talk a good game, get our votes and hopes up, and then inevitably cave to Democrats. Trump would have none of that. When he said during his first election we would win so much we would get tired of winning, that was truly something new under the sun for conservatives. Was winning that much even allowed?
Clear and Present Opportunities
If it wasn’t for Trump and his willingness to stand against the entire Uniparty establishment in Washington, it’s likely Buchanan’s pessimism about the West would likely have proved correct. Circa 2002, he laid out four “clear and present dangers” that will inevitably bring death if they are not addressed. Trump was the one God raised up to turn these threats into opportunities and give us a realistic chance of victory over three of them.
- Dying population.
- Mass immigration of people of different colors, creeds, and culture changing the character of the West forever.
- The rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, or cultural Marxism, what we now call woke.
- The breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government, thus the end of nations, or globalism.
The only thing Trump can’t do is to make people have more babies. That gets to the heart of the matter. As Buchanan says, the culture war is ultimately a religious war, and religious people have more babies than secular people. Christians are going to have to save the West from demographic doom by once again being obedient to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.
As for 2-4, what happened since Trump came down the escalator and the left went crazy is something Buchanan could not have predicted then. In God’s providence, allowing the election to be stolen was the brilliant strategy of providence, God making it the fundamental factor in the process of exposing the left. With Trump apparently finally vanquished, especially after the deep state PSYOP of J6 when Trump and all of MAGA were finally discredited, they could now get on with Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America.” It turns out Americans are not so fond of Marxist fundamental transformations. And I don’t use the word Marxist frivolously. In the , Marx and Engles identify four enemies of communism that must be abolished, and they perfectly align with the four “clear and present dangers” laid out by Buchanan. That is not a coincidence. They are:
- Private property
- The family
- The nation-state
- Religion, i.e., Christianity
Everything the Democrat Party of Obama-Biden stands for, Marx would applaud because their policies effectively abolish all four of these. The sexual revolution starting in the 60s effectively abolished the family and contributes to dying populations and demographic apocalypse. Again, Christians will have to lead the way in obedience to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.
When Biden took office, he immediately opened the boarder which means the end of the nation-state, and effectively globalism. So called “free trade” and the dominance of major corporations is an assault on private property, as is global finance and fiat currency. Lastly, woke went into overdrive which is a direct assault on Christianity and the family, and you have the perfect Marxist storm for the death of the West. But therein lay our opportunity for those with eyes to see. The woke globalists were building a fragile papier-mâché Berlin Wall culture that would come tumbling down as the lies were being exposed. Everything the left does, however, is built on lies, and an empire of lies cannot stand. With Trump as enemy number one, the left completely lost their minds and normal Americans woke up and said we’ve had enough. Trump’s “loss” in 2020 was the best thing that could have happened to America and the West.
Not only have Americans, as Steve Bannon says, had a belly full of it, but Trump and the entire MAGA movement have learned a lot in these last four years. The entire apparatus of the administrative deep state is now exposed, and Trump has a mandate to take it on. The dream team he’s assembling will take no prisoners, but as we’ve seen, the establishment will not be handing out the welcome mat for the dissolution of their power. It will be hand-to-hand combat, sometimes like World War I trench warfare, an inch at a time, but the cover of darkness is no longer available to the swamp. Limiting the size and scope of government might for the first time in my life be a real possibility, but MAGA and true conservatives must be persistent, determined, and downright belligerent at times to make sure the ball moves forward, even if it’s two yards and a cloud of dust.
What’s most exciting for me is that Christianity is once again being seem as a positive force for human flourishing. This is especially true among the youngest generation who moved in a conservative direction in a most unexpected way in the election. Young people just don’t do that because, well, they’re young and stupid, and that’s what you do when you’re young. Not this generation. They’ve lived with the lies of secularism, grown up with woke and Covid, and they want nothing to do with it. It’s actually cool for the first time in my life for young people to be conservative! And Christians are able to be “loud and proud” about their faith, instead of homosexuals or feminists about their perversions. The Great Awakening is happening, and it is a thrilling time to be alive. And we’re only just getting started.
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