The Uphill Battle for Social Conservatives Against the Leftist Mass Media

(Above: President Ronald Reagan, along with one his most famous quotes.)

Introduction: The 1980's Represented "Morning in America"

(Above: 1984 Reagan/Bush campaign ad, "It's morning in America.")

Ronald Reagan is considered by the vast majority of history and political scholars as the last great president. As such, this leads one to recognize the sheer dearth of well-qualified leadership from the subsequent candidates to have run and been elected to the most powerful leadership position on Earth since "Dutch" left office in 1989. During the Reagan years, America experienced a phenomena of social simplification in comparison to the previous 20, which were filled with civil unrest and growing immorality with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's, the counterculture movement promoting free love and peace under the pretense of civil disobedience that ultimately produced the bulk of today's liberal politicians and media pundits, the feminist movement that engendered the culture of sex without repercussions for women as a result of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortions, and finally the birth of environmental conservationism which greatly contributed to the great economic malaise between 1968 and 1982 popularly referred to today as stagflation.  Though two Republicans served as president between 1961 and 1981 (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), neither one can be classified as having been a conservative in accordance to the standard set by both Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who challenged the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Presidential Election yet lost in a landslide, and Ronald Reagan, an actor who achieved fame from humble beginnings and who delivered his first landmark political speech in stumping for his friend Goldwater during his campaign, known to history as "A Time for Choosing." Below is a video of that speech:

It perhaps took a former Democrat disenchanted with the party's platform to call "a spade a spade." But that was what the world had in Ronald Reagan. There is an old cliche of which I am quite fond of reciting when I talk to someone I find to be truly unique and endowed by God with a great gift, and as such, I will adjust the phrasing to describe what I believe to be true about Ronald Reagan: "If Reagan didn't exist, we'd have to invent him." Truly, Reagan was more than a simple politician. He was an American icon whose legacy was born from the roots of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who was the first to allude to the qualities of what would become "the American Dream."  As  Reagan was born in the small rural town of Dixon, Illinois, this was a far cry from the laps of luxury many of his presidential predecessors enjoyed. He was truly a self-made man, a strict adherent to the mantra that hard work pays off.  It was this principle, therefore, that served as the foundation of his core principles and beliefs, and assisted him in stating such comments that by 2013's standards, are truly profound in the level of their wisdom and the ignorance from those who have lost sight of it:

"My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose -- somehow we win out."

With his election to the presidency in 1980 after his experience as governor of California, the culture of America retracted to that more associated with the 1950's. Society became simpler; it was, in reference to the immortal lyrics directly echoing the words of the song's title by Huey Lewis and the News, "hip to be square" again for the first time in nearly a quarter century.  Stifled were the blood-curdling screams of feminists, environmentalists, and bitter civil rights activists who had lived for the day when the black community in America would be the governing elite in much the same fashion as the white minorities of South Africa had since 1948 when the policy of Apartheid was implemented. The emphasis on class warfare, the concept of the "majority-minority us" against the evil white men of the world, no longer loomed large over the airwaves of television or cinema, or so much from the editors-in-chief or the journalists who had for so long perpetuated the cause of liberalism. For the first, and sadly, the only time in American history dating as far back as the founding permanent colonial establishments at Jamestown and Plymouth, America was finally "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Virtually everyone prospered, people of all walks of life -- the poor, the black community, Hispanics, and women -- and for a period of 12 years, the culture of dependency and the bitter divisions drawn first in 1955 when the Civil Rights Movement officially began were being forgotten.

And the hippies who instilled the culture we see today within the Left?  What became of them? Well, they transformed their image as they had done twice before when they first were the beatnik vagabond poets of the vanguard culture during the mid-to-late 1950's, later to morph into the classified taxonomy of the 1960's associated with the counterculture movement promulgating sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll; and finally in the 1980's into something far different and yet more insidious than either of those movements: that of the "yuppies," where they became members of the upper-middle business class during a time where the economy was on the upswing and the culture of responsibility and not dependency was the posh thing to do for the first time since the 1920's. Of course, this method of gaining wealth would serve these people, still largely of the liberal mindset, toward the end of obtaining power over the next 30 years, as most of America's powerful lawmakers in both the GOP and Democratic Parties benefited greatly from President Reagan's supply-side economic principles, or more commonly referred to in the leftist pop culture lexicon as "Reaganomics." The liberals are quick to criticize conservatives and libertarians for that which they achieve that is successful, while surreptitiously being mindful amid their shallow denials that they, themselves, greatly benefited as the vast majority did so during the Reagan Revolution.

The fear that had festered in the American stream of consciousness since 1949 upon the Soviet Union detonating its first atomic bomb came to an end as a result of Reagan's aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy that was in stark contrast to the previous methods of appeasement known as Containment and Detente.  The Left has aggressively endeavored to discredit the Reagan record on the matter, but as I am all too fond of saying and you have now grown to expect out of the buttons of my very keyboard, "You and I know better." Upon being briefed of the extreme state of malaise of not just the economy but also the military, Reagan quickly acted to create his national defense policy he stated that was based upon the Goldwater philosophy of "peace through strength" by embarking upon the most massive military buildup in U.S. history, not just during wartime, but anytime, peacetime or not.  In doing so, he decided to engage in an experiment to see how the Soviet Union, still under the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who crushed the rebellion in Czechoslovakia during what became known as "The Prague Spring" and had ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, would react by announcing to the nation March 23, 1983 an initiative that would "render the awesome Soviet military threat impotent and obsolete."  This initiative, famous to Republicans and reviled by Democrats, was the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known to history as "Star Wars."  Below is President Reagan announcing his intentions to the world on national television from the Oval Office to fund the plan to the fullest extent of the government's capacity:

President Reagan took a dramatically different approach in dealing with the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Whereas previous administrations dating back to Harry S. Truman enacted policies that were largely based upon the stenches reeking of appeasement and amelioration, Reagan played a form of diplomatic and militaristic "chicken" by aggressively tackling the enemy nation head-on. By introducing the SDI program, he increased the stakes of expenditures for the Soviet Union beyond its capacity to pay. Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the economy began its final crash; the citizens in the Soviet Union found to their horror empty grocery shelves in the cities, massive inflation, and the inability to manufacture tax revenue and gross domestic product fast enough to maintain the military supremacy it had achieved over the U.S. and its NATO allies beginning in 1969 when the malaise of America's military initiated.  It was at this time that the death knell began to be hammered into the coffin of the Soviet Union, which first saw the domino effect of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc of Communist nations previously dominated by Soviet supremacy for more than 40 years denouncing Communism and ushering in a new era of liberty, which two years later resulted in the confederation of republics comprising the Communist nation breaking apart and thus dissolving the nation Reagan had referred to as "the evil empire" less than a decade before on December 31, 1991.

The greatest legacy of the Reagan Revolution, however, is the 12 year moratorium on the perpetuation of liberal values characterized most affirmatively by the following cliche businesses borrowed from Ogden Nash, "Sex sells." No longer were the concepts of licentiousness and the promulgation of promiscuity being broadcast in such great frequency than that which had grown more intense from the 1960's on through the next 20 years.  Hollywood returned to providing more wholesome family entertainment, albeit a more realistic take on life from a Middle American perspective. It was at its most wholesome since the early 1960's before the gas of political activism was splashed over the flames of national revolution and social discord. The media no longer had the ability to counter the efforts of President Reagan to engender an alteration in the nation's culture from one of godless subliminal messages in pop culture to that which would be endowed with more of the Judeo-Christian principles upon which this nation was founded over two centuries prior.  As stated, no longer was the concept of rendering the nation's "great unwashed" to the soup ladle of government dependency in style, but rather a new standard of culture was instilled as a result of the Reagan Revolution promoting responsibility as a byproduct of increased liberty that would result in greater prosperity for all Americans regardless of income.  Through a series of massive tax cuts in both 1981 and 1986, along with President Reagan working closely with Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to reduce the 13.5% rate of inflation he inherited from the Carter administration as well as tackling big labor unions and implementing a policy of economic deregulation, America experienced its longest and most prolific period of economic growth and prosperity in a history characterized by the greatest slew of achievements in just over 200 years the world has ever known. It was these measures that gave birth to a culture predicated upon the exquisite qualities of not just political, but social conservatism as well, that can best be summarized in Ronald Reagan's promise to the American people upon his reelection in 1984 when he proclaimed that it was "Morning in America." This dream was realized, and lasted until 1993, when Reagan's former vice president and successor to the Oval Office, George H.W. Bush, transferred the power of the presidency over to Bill Clinton under the auspices of ignominious defeat as a result of his betrayal of the American people's trust that were still predicated upon the standard of conservative values manifested by the Reagan Revolution.  It was at this time that America not only lost its way in terms of economic and political freedom, but in its ability to turn on the television set or read a newspaper or magazine without viewing the previous forms of godless behavior based upon the principles of that terrible phrase of Nash's that now reigns more supremely than ever in the pantheons of American media and pop culture.

The Uphill Battle Facing Social Conservatives Today Against the Leftist Mass Media

The Reagan Revolution redefined the image of the American people from that of the collective that is characteristic of Communist and socialist democratic governments in Europe and elsewhere into one of the individual.  In doing so, the Left was stunned, leaving its only recourse in its vain attempts to discredit the rising tide of economic, political, and social conservatism by declaring the Reagan Revolution catered to the people's innate tendencies to be greedy; hence, the Left, through their mouthpiece of the mass media, declared during the 1980's and well into future that the decade was embodied by greed, that the rich grew richer while the poor grew poorer. The Left has always been of the mindset that mankind is inherently evil, that it must be reined in by the power of a cabal of masters. Hence, in its distrust, they have played upon these motives by instilling fear into the hearts and minds of the American people since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). This is in diametric opposition to the philosophy of Reagan, who unlike the Democrats in Congress, always credited the American people for any and all progress manifested economically, socially, and through acts of private altruism and generosity.  Again, I will use what has become my favorite phrase to use as a retort to these false pontificates of lies and evil virtue when I say, "You and I know better."  Not only are the references by the Left of the 1980's being the decade of greed and those cliches popular with that lunatic fringe regarding the rich growing richer while the poor growing poorer false and erroneous, they are actually quite to the contrary.  While it is true that the gap between the rich and the poor grew during the period from 1981 to 1993, it is also right to state that all levels of income increased in both economic viability and purchasing power, and the number of people living below the poverty line dropped while those who remained in its grip still earned an average of 8% more in wages than during the Carter administration. Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the 1980's as a result of "Reaganomics," and the nation's level of wealth increased by more than one-third while the price of most commodities such as oil and gas decreased substantially with regards to inflation ratio as a result of the efforts by President Reagan and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker implementing sound monetary policies to deflate the price of goods and services below that of the 1970's stagflated prices.  As such, the changing economic atmosphere created a new culture in the world of the media and entertainment as people began to share in the wealth amid their having more influence on what they wanted to experience. As stated before, the trends of cultural and moral decay ceased to be for twelve years as the nation's morals became more in line with that of godliness and self-determination leading to prosperity.  

Upon Bill Clinton taking office, the advances America had made during the years of the Reagan Revolution took a U-turn for the worst and have not looked back. Not only has the economic, political, and moral decay not looked back, it is far more egregious and extreme than ever before. The phenomena was propagated the most by MTV when the networks began broadcasting a series of reality shows where the acts of promiscuous sex under a careless demeanor and mentality became the accepted norm to spectate, and therefore, to practice; the show I think of the most upon my reflecting on this phenomena are the Real World and Jersey Shore series'.  Over the course of the past 20 years, this trend has not just been exacerbated, but also has increased ten-fold in its intensity and graphic nature upon the principles of sex, drugs, and violence.

While reading yesterday's E-mail subscription I receive daily in my inbox titled The Objective Conservative, the proprietor of the blog discusses the above decline in the power of social conservatives in combating the growing tide of influences emanating from the leftist mass media. Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was quoted to have said, "Print is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party." Interestingly, he was a member of the political Left, albeit in its most extreme form, Communism.

(Above: Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who ruled the U.S.S.R. with an iron fist from 1924 until his death in 1953.)

In agreeing with the principle behind Stalin's statement, it is eerily representative of what we as a people face today.  In the rearview mirror is the Reagan Revolution, gone forever from its blaze of glory, and in its place is leftist political thought first espoused by the radicals in the French Revolution and later by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The Objective Conservative provided the transcript of the article from The Rotheberg Political Report  on the manner, which will be posted right below:

It’s Uphill All the Way for Social Conservatives

STUART ROTHENBERGJULY 3, 2013 · 10:17 AM EDT

Although the seemingly unstoppable march of cultural liberalism took pause during the years of Ronald Reagan and even into the 1990's, it is back on track.  Liberals will applaud it and conservatives will dread it, but it is silly to deny its strength.

Television and movies reflect our current values and concerns, but they also help mold public opinion. For decades, that message has been one encouraging more equality, diversity and multiculturalism — and less tradition and religion. This isn’t all that surprising considering the ideological bent of most entertainers, producers, directors and writers.

Starting with TV shows like “All in the Family,” “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Maude,” progressing to the very funny “Will & Grace” and going right up to today’s most obvious example, “Glee,” television has pushed socially progressive themes. Socially progressive characters are enlightened and admirable, while traditionalists are unappealing, to say the least.

Of course, popular culture has not limited its “teaching” to cultural themes. The business community usually gets more than its share of contempt. One of my favorite recent TV series, “Damages,” which starred Glenn Close, based every season’s story on vile, corrupt, deceitful, money-grubbing, power-seeking businessmen who had little or no respect for human life.

But business has gotten off easy, compared with cultural conservatives who don’t have financial networks and savvy corporate CEOs to present an alternate perspective.

The public and TV networks’ reactions to two recent Supreme Court decisions, one invalidating Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the other invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act, were noteworthy.

Both decisions were 5-4, but only about the Voting Rights Act decision did I hear the high court widely described as “bitterly divided.”

In the days after the Voting Rights Act decision, you might have thought that the high court had taken away the right to vote from African-Americans. Journalists gave plenty of attention to voices opposing the decision and arguing that the ruling would overturn all the progress of civil rights since the 1960s.

The media’s coverage of the DOMA decision, on the other hand, was almost euphoric, geared overwhelmingly toward those celebrating the decision.

Admittedly, opponents of the decision were noticeably quiet after the court’s ruling. Of course, opposing gay marriage has increasingly been equated with intolerance, meanness, bigotry, religious fundamentalism and lack of intelligence, so many displeased by the ruling may have figured that silence was the safest course.

The type of coverage of the two decisions undoubtedly also reflects the fundamental values of most journalists, who are generally more liberal than the country as a whole. There appeared to be plenty of cheerleading after the two rulings on same-sex marriage, and not merely from the obvious voices on MSNBC.

But it wasn’t only surrounding the Supreme Court’s opinions on marriage that some of the recent media coverage seemed tilted.

On his final show hosting CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, media critic Howard Kurtz commented on the media’s very sympathetic treatment of Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, whose 11-hour filibuster at the end of a special session prevented the enactment of a bill limiting abortions and requiring facilities performing abortions to meet certain standards.

“If Wendy Davis had been conducting a lonely filibuster against abortion rights,” Kurtz asked, “would the media have celebrated her in quite the same way?” Kurtz didn’t offer an answer — because he didn’t have to. The answer certainly would have been “no.”

For social conservatives, the greatest problem may be the undermining of traditional religious authority and belief.

While Gallup showed only a slight annual increase last year in the percentage of people saying that they had no religious identification (up to 17.8 percent in 2012), the trend is clear.

“The rise in the religious ‘nones’ over time is one of the most significant trends in religious measurement in the United States. … The percentage who did not report [a religious] identity began to rise in the 1970s and has continued to increase in the years since,” wrote Gallup in a January 2013 report.

In the 2012 exit poll, President Barack Obama won 62 percent of voters who never attend religious services but only 39 percent of those who attended weekly. He carried 70 percent of those voters who said they had no religion, compared with only 42 percent of Protestants and 50 percent of Catholics.

(Next month, I have tickets to see the Broadway hit “The Book of Mormon,” which lampoons not only Mormonism but all organized religion and literal belief. Is there a Broadway blockbuster that mocks an iconic liberal value?)

Social conservatives probably see Obama, liberals on the Supreme Court and Democrats in Congress as their main adversaries. But they are wrong. The most important leaders of cultural liberalism may well be the members of the media and entertainment communities, and social conservatives simply have no strategy to deal with that.

***

Conclusion: The Leftist Mass Media Influences the Direction of the Electoral Process

Upon reading the article by Mr. Rothenberg and further reflecting upon my adult life as a registered voter, I fully understand that more than even the most charismatic politicians today, the leftist mass media plays a significant role in influencing the flight and direction of the electoral process.  By the same token, though, we must also remember that there are exceptions to every rule, and this one is no different.  In 1980, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican challenger to the incumbent President Jimmy Carter, had enough charisma and sway over those in the media that he was able to win the election in an electoral landslide.  While Reagan only garnered 50.9% of the popular vote, a statistic the Left loves to flaunt when they suggest that Jimmy Carter was only swamped in the election in the name of the legal method in which all presidential elections' have been measured since 1796, they will rarely tell you that there was a third presidential candidate running on as an Independent and therefore Reagan's extremely-small majority of the voter resulted in the "low" percentage total; in fact, Jimmy Carter received only approximately 45% of the popular vote.  As we once believed as a society that we were shaped in the form of clean, wholesome, Middle American values, President Obama has served as an impediment to the issues, to which I cry "foul."

There is yet another interesting circumstance to consider in understanding why Reagan had such a broad appeal among America's electorate.  Political analysts have discussed this ad nauseum for more than 30 years, and I am beginning to believe this to be true: that Reagan still had a significant base of support within the Democratic Party itself, a phenomenon no other politician either Republican or Democrat has ever been so blessed to experience. As he stated in his "A Time for Choosing" stump speech for Sen. Goldwater in 1964, he was once a Democrat, but had grown disenchanted with the party platform of increasing the size, influence, and role government serves in the lives of the American people.  His adopted son, Michael Reagan, stated in an interview on a program about "The Gipper" I once watched on History that his father told him upon leaving the Democratic Party that among his main reasons were because "they tax people nine cents to every dime." While the Kennedy and Johnson administrations actually endeavored in cutting taxes in response to an economic recession in 1963 and 1964, the wealthiest Americans still were paying a far higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than we see people in the same income bracket do today. But in 1968, however, Johnson showed his true colors when he increased taxes, particularly with the implementation of the now-infamous 10% surcharge that ironically coincided with the birth of that economic phenomena that wrought havoc upon America known as stagflation. Ergo, the reason behind the initiatives President Reagan implemented in 1981 with the first of his massive tax cuts where the wealthiest Americans were only being taxed 50% of their incomes -- the lowest totals in nearly 50 years -- was because he truly believed, just as Thomas Jefferson did, that true prosperity was not bequeathed to the American people by any falsely-perceived concept of altruism by government, but rather by one being free to retain the fruits to his or her own labor. Government cannot possibly be altruistic, in Reagan's opinion, because the source of its purse is not of its own devices, but by that of robbing entrepreneurs of their hard-earned wages and redistributing that money to those who sit by idly and not work. As a result, the culture changed with the Reagan tax cuts. By the time Reagan left office in 1989, the highest incomes were paying only 28.5% -- among the lowest percentages for the wealthiest Americans to be taxed since the Coolidge administration.  

The leftist mass media is the Democratic Party's version of the TASS news agency of the former Soviet Union. It to this day remains the vocal mouthpiece mechanism of the Left in influencing both political and pop culture in America as well as Western Europe.   While I can no longer recall many of the events of the 1980's prior to around 1988 other than my watching President Reagan delivering speeches, which resulted in my reportedly screaming very loudly, "REAGAN! REAGAN!" or tuning into my favorite cartoons and family programs such as Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, Fraggle Rock, The Smurfs, The Super Friends, and ALF due to being so young, I am always listening to stories of Dad's very fond memories of that decade.  As Dad was born in 1951 and began to grow more aware of his surroundings by the late 1950's and early 1960's, he lived his life in every decade prior to the 1980's, as well, obviously, as the subsequent ones, and has maintained to this day that he never felt more comfortable or secure in his quality of life than he did when Reagan was president between 1981 and 1989. He feels less safe and secure today than ever before in his life.

As Mr. Rothenberg correctly asserted, the Reagan Revolution delivered to America a 12-year respite from the liberal malaise our society had experienced in the decades prior. Back then, there were more Evangelicals, pro-life and pro-gun activists in the 1980's than during any prior generation in modern history, both past and that initial time's definition being one and the same. As many of those Evangelicals, such as Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker, were revealed to have been guilty of corruption, as well as were many other business moguls and tycoons, this mitigated the Left's cause in declaring the 1980's as the decade greed dominated American pop culture. Yet, there was also much good accomplished during the decade, as majority of the programming on television, while more socially progressive than those in the 1950's and 1960's, were far more wholesome and reflective of the realism that was then, and is today, most prominent in America as opposed to the gross materialism and sexual overtones the overwhelming leftist Hollywood industry and mass media have not only been re-injected into the American stream of consciousness, but have succeeded in increasing the intensity of the content to which we as a people are exposed. We see violent crime having risen sharply since the Reagan years, education decreasing in terms of test scores and graduation rates even as government is now standardizing scholastic standards socially with the failing Common Core policies, and an extreme spike in immorality through the licentiousness of teenagers and adults alike resulting in unwanted pregnancies that have led to an increase of the evil practice of abortions and the presence of single parent families for those women who decide graciously to continue with the pregnancy. We are a nation of broken homes, with both spouses who are parents working full-time jobs that result in the stunting of the development of their offspring, all because the Left wishes to transform the roles of women in society from the ones of the dedicated wife and nurturing mother to the ambitious businesswoman and power broker more inclined to be sexually-liberated, free and unfettered to do with their bodies as they so choose, up to and including killing the innocent unborn children they conceive through through their libertine behavior.  This all began with the beat movement in the 1950's and lasted throughout its first wave until the Reagan Revolution began in 1980.  From that time until the end of the George H.W. Bush presidency in 1993, there was a retraction of much of the damage to American society the Left had wrought for more than 20 years.  But upon the election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992, the liberalization of politics and pop culture were reborn, and have now reached alarming new heights in its graphic intensity.

In closing, then, I caution my fellow American contemporaries to seek greater education about the history of the world, Western philosophy, and by all means, endeavor to read about the issues in which your local and state officials champion.  The decline in America's exceptionalism has never been so extreme or threatening as it is today during the presidency of Barack Obama, and that has just been within the past four and a half years. The culture of dependency that even President Clinton, albeit through coercion by the Republican-controlled Congress under the "Contract with America" led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, worked to curtail as a result of the once-thought to be lasting imprint of the Reagan Revolution on society is now back and more ubiquitous in its presence than ever before in the history of the United States since the FDR administration. According to NBC News, with a total of more than 46 million Americans receiving food stamps in 2012 in comparison to the 24 million who did in 1994, the Obama administration's policies have relegated a significant portion of the American people to the soup ladle of dependency upon the government for their very survival.  In that same article, a poll survey was conducted that found that the largest percentage of those questioned, 24%, believe that "government welfare" is the biggest reason behind the persistent poverty plaguing America today.  The results of the poll, which will be shown in the form of a bar graph, are below:

  

This is obviously not what the Left wants to hear, nor its mouthpiece in the mass media.  Couple this sign of the public's growing discontent with what it believes is the gross misallocation of tax dollars along with the slew of scandals plaguing the Obama administration, and we may have the secret to the recipe necessary to bring about a resurgence of the Republican Party in the 2014 and 2016 elections.  Of course, there is also the side to the story that I have always believed to be true: that being the GOP serving as its own worst enemy and not that of their political opposition.  In an article I will later author, Rush Limbaugh believes that several grievous errors by Republican lawmakers recently will lead to the GOP losing the House of Representatives despite the slew of scandals which have been revealed to the public.  As anything can happen according to Murphy's Law, so, too, could that, but I do not find it likely unless the GOP in the House fails to defeat the immigration bill that was passed by nearly two-thirds of the Senate, which included some 13 Republicans including my home state senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker.  At that, we may see more upheaval within the GOP that will further propagate the cause of liberalism in America much as the divisions within the Democratic Party that began during the presidency of Jimmy Carter lasted for more than 16 years and led to the Reagan Revolution, which overlapped into the George H.W. Bush presidency that lasted from 1989-1993.

Unlike Mr. Rothenberg, however, I do see hope on the horizon, a characteristic trademark of the Reagan Revolution.  While the twelve years of "Morning in America" faded into the sunset upon the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, there are still remnants of his legacy remaining.  In the young, rising leaders of the party such as Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, I see a new generation of some of the brightest, most charismatic minds and personalities the party has seen since Ronald Reagan.

The Left, though, will continue to promote the practice of spreading public dependency even if it comes under the guise of Sloth. Thomas Aquinas once discussed the concept of Sloth in his famous theological work Summa Theologiae with this phrase (Courtesy of Deadly Sins.com):

(Above: St. Thomas Aquinas, historically-renowned philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

"Sloth is the desire for ease, even at the expense of doing the known will of God. Whatever we do in life requires effort. Everything we do is to be a means of salvation. The slothful person is unwilling to do what God wants because of the effort it takes to do it. Sloth becomes a sin when it slows down and even brings to a halt the energy we must expend in using the means to salvation."

As Sloth is one of the "Seven Deadly Sins" taught by the Roman Catholic Church for its followers to avoid, our nation, on the other hand, has aimed to promote rather than deter this threat. People know next to nothing about the issues affecting the nation today, nor do they care about the mistakes of the past that are easily avoided.  As such, the Left preys upon this weakness and gains power, which begets tyranny. We conservative-libertarians can therefore not afford to waste the next three years by allowing the Left through the Democratic Party to further cement their power when they are now at their most vulnerable for the first time in decades.  Let us act now to bring about another "Morning in America" and an "era of good feelings."

What would Reagan do? Well, listen to how he responded to Sam Donaldson's obnoxious question and see his reply: