For the time being, we retain the rights to free speech, assembly, gun ownership, a fair trial, to vote, etc. This is to the positive.
What I feel strongly we must look to for a strong, good, future, is a generalized capacity to think. Within a democratic Republic, nothing can take the place of good thinking. And I think a case can be made that this capacity has never been generalized anywhere, certainly not outside the educated elites, and our particular malady is that the elites are the worst offenders.
There is so malignant hatred out there, so much venom, so much blindness and deceitfulness, almost all of it on one side of the debate (a fact obscured by the further fact that they invest all their energies accusing their enemies of these traits): it is hard to know how to deal with it. There is no truth you can speak which cannot, as Kipling had it, be twisted to make a trap for fools.
Generations of fools stand in front of us: generations of leftists who have dedicated their lives and enthusiasms to the task of making government omnipotent. To what end, they cannot say, but since they long ago renounced concrete improvements in human conditions of life, their sacred duty has become a generalized infantilization of all nations. Logically, if they can’t help people who are not infants, they CAN help them if they first make them helpless without them.
Again, this is hate, masquerading as love and compassion, and it is hard to know what to do with it. They want you to quit, they want reason, justice, truth to mean whatever they need it to mean at any given moment.
Here is my truth: you can’t quit, and you can’t use their tactics. They are good at what they do, which is shrinking minds to the point where they literally believe whatever they are told. Even if we somehow got everyone to feed such minds accurate ideas, conservative ideas, they would still be infantilized.
We must take the high road. It is a harder road, and it is an uncertain road. But it is the only path with dignity, and without dignity, without honor, there is nothing.