Before we start the actual article, we would like to mention and give our respect and condolences to all who are feeling the loss of Chuck Berry. The man was a Rock-n-Roll icon to four generations and his concerts later in his life while he was in his 70’s would draw everything from teenagers to silver haired ladies and all would rock right along as one. The man was also an example of how one should live their lives. His life was dedicated to his music, his fans, married to the same woman his entire life, did not abuse drugs, did not drink and was a man who attended church and truly lived a well-mannered life. We wish to respect his life and mourn a world which has lost a truly great man.
President Trump has all the power and can do anything he desires. This is the fear mongering we read in the newspapers all too often and hear from the leftists in full panic attack as they no longer control the White House. After eight years of a Progressive Democrat following eight years of a Progressive Republican which followed eight more years of a Progressive Democrat the left and the Progressive right are in a panic. They really should calm themselves as President Donald Trump is a fellow Progressive in many ways even if those he has appointed to some very important posts are not such. Look at those posts and one should be glad that he has put unemotional purists in the slots dealing with national security, the military, counter terrorism, homeland security, intelligence position and such which protect America and the free world. Thus far the most counter progressive appointment he made has been Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and his main offense has been refusing to make law by interpreting the law to meet supposed modern sensitivities and instead simply applying the law. This has put Senator Schumer’s panties in a bunch and sent him screaming into the halls of the Senate rallying the troops. But we can expect this for every nominee which President Trump puts forth for position on any bench and perhaps people should remind Senator Schumer that it was President Obama who appointed Judge Neil Gorsuch to his current position. But Senator Schumer is far from the main opposition President Trump is facing.
President Trump is facing a hostile media which currently he is enjoying the threat and has turned much of the confrontation to his benefit, but that cannot last. The media enjoys strong allies placed throughout the nation in the form of entertainment media, their secret weapon. As television, music, movie and other entertainment venues slowly chip and pick at the position of the President and make jokes about his every miscue these things pile up and with time begin to affect the thinking of many Americans. Slowly they will ebb away at his support and make him appear buffoonish and even stupid and uneducated which will erode faith in his ability to make wise choices. As such, they will have him at a disadvantage within a couple of years and may make his reelection all but impossible. President Trump very likely will not even seek reelection as if there is a strong sense of doubt that he could win no matter who the Democrats put forth or that the Republicans themselves may try to unseat him in the primaries, he may decide that with such disregard for his efforts, why bother. But even all of this is not his greatest opposition.
President Trump’s greatest opposition is the government itself. While we have been asleep since about 1965 the government has grown to the point where the elected politicians do not even make the laws any longer, that has been relegated to the unelected bureaucrats. When the House of Representatives or the Senate write a piece of legislation it defines the end results they wish to see. This gets tossed around and watered down until it really means absolutely nothing at all, it just has some feel good phrases and soundbites which can be used in their reelection campaigns and some high-minded and altruistic goal in the title and otherwise is an empty shell. The only exceptions are military budgets and tax legislation where they say exactly what the lobbyists and the Generals desire most. These other empty titles are passed off with the same phrase that the Secretary of one of the many Cabinet positions used so their assistants and their assistants and on and on to fill in the legislation with the regulations necessary to accommodate the desired meaning of the bill. Now these Cabinet Secretaries are not about to spend their time weaving these bills into operative and meaningful actions as they are mostly there to oversee that things get accomplished. To that end they will slide this off on some high ranking bureaucrat responsible and presumably knowledgeable to flush everything out who passes this off to some of their underlings on down until it reaches somebody who has nobody else to pass it to or until someone feels like this is their ticket to the top and the regulations are written and the wheels of government continue to grind, the people they presumably serve, into dust. New rules are issued and eventually someone runs afoul of one of these regulations which most never knew existed but somebody inevitably gets caught in the wheels of the legislative and regulatory nightmare.
Any hope that President Trump believes he has for changing government will get lost somewhere deep inside the legislative machinery which now employs almost one in fourteen Americans (the number is higher if you count only working Americans, it more than doubles to 16.7 percent of the U.S. workforce). The government workers union, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), was actually heavily invested in the reelection campaign for President Obama though they did so outside of the view of the media. The government, especially the Federal Government, is filled with people who are ardent Democrat supporters and are fully indoctrinated in liberal ideology. This has been further enforced through selective hiring and as the most dangerous time in a government worker’s career are the first few years, the years when they can be fired or removed through a reduction in force (RIF) directive where the department head is to remove people with the most recent hire first and in reverse order with an exception that if they can find a nonessential position where two people are performing a similar job for which only one is necessary, then the more junior person can be let go. This second means is another means whereby an identified conservative will be fired despite the many protections government workers enjoy. There is another way such an employee can keep their position but that requires approvals and other means whereby they push a person with less time in government out in their place and many are reluctant and prefer just finding a real job, as they would phrase it. These are the people who started the idea that it takes three government workers to do a single job equivalent to the same job in the real world. Is it true? Who knows, no such study has or ever will be permitted to be performed. Having resided in Washington D.C. and having been married to an employee of our Federal Government, I refuse to answer because the government has such long arms and is run by just such persons. Changing or removing some of, if not most, of these people is near impossible as this video explains to some extent.
Percentage of American Population Working for Government by Year
The problem is not entirely in the government though that is where President Trump will find the greatest resistance and the perversion of everything he believes he has achieved unless he can persuade the Congress to actually write the entirety of the law and not leave it to the government machine to define the rules. Did I mention that this will never happen? The problem actually starts far earlier than with the government. It starts with the education system and from the earliest grades. We hear about the rare teacher who spouts out their political feelings and denounces President Trump, President Bush or whatever politician, usually a Republican. Do such denunciations ever target a Democrat? Great question and an example would be greatly appreciated. The reality is that many parents do not ask their children what happened or what they learned in school and when they do the child often shrugs or says, “Nothin’ much” and it gets dropped at that. If their child did grace them with an example, it would likely be the one thing they did learn and remember learning, but much of learning is more subtle, closer to subliminal. It is the subliminal education which often is the most permanent and where indoctrination does its damage. The textbooks are often written by academics that also have a left leaning slant and outside of the hard sciences there is much room for the soft indoctrination from the left in their education and through their societal influences. This is what has led to the “safe spaces” and the disinviting of conservative speakers or the outrageous actions such as the recent events at Middlebury College or University of California Berkley where students basically rioted and at one location severely injured one of the professors who was assigned to moderate the talk. These actions and the rioting in many cities where law enforcement was instructed to back off and give the rioters both in the cities and colleges the room required for them to express their outrage was an outrage in itself. Is this to be the face of the new world where hooligans are permitted freedom to destroy property and injure those with whom they feel have no right to any contrary opinion, or even who are accused of having a contrary opinion? If this is the way of the society in the West, then we can be assured that the West is going to fall. This is uncivil behavior and no civilization can survive when incivility becomes an acceptable means of expression. Such permissiveness and a government which with continued growth could reach an unsupportable size are reasons that Europe is failing and could become a critical problem for the United States as well.
There is one last item which could also cause the end of Western civilization, its inability to defend itself. The United States is still the world’s greatest super power, but that is not guaranteed for the future. It was not all that long ago when Great Britain was the great power and before them France and even Spain and they all proved, as if Rome had not done so before them, all super powers finally fall. Going back even further there were Greece, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Hittites, China, India and even Siam. Having great power is not a guarantee of continued power. That requires dedications, vigilance and the desire to continue to bear the costs of such preeminence. Such costs continue to rise as weapon systems grow ever more complex and research takes greater scientific knowledge which brings us back to education, in this case the hard sciences, an area of endeavor which remains the most challenging and the less inclined rarely venture into these waters. Without an expressed importance placed on such study, it falls by the wayside as does military power which is not properly stressed and thus funded. The problem comes when a society gains so large a cost of social spending, particularly welfare spending and retirement promises where recipients don’t or no longer replace revenues into the system, exceeds the limitations of taxes and other revenues that the military becomes an expense no longer afforded. This is a prospect which the guaranteed minimum wage, especially as a livable wage, makes an even more dire situation and brings the choice as a sooner onset rather than a later one. There is a development which if technology continues at its current rate of increase will make these two situations collide and force a complete revamping of revenue enhancing streams as otherwise the governments will financially collapse. Eventually these advancements will make work more of a hobby which select groups will dedicate themselves towards while the majority of the population will do as they see fit and be permitted such by the advances of technology. That, perhaps, should be a future article leaving us to conclude on that sweet note.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 