"Moral Clarity"

 I hope this essay does not come across as narcissistic or sanctimonious. Certainly, no one should read into this essay that I am an example of moral righteousness, for I am not. But it is a subject which many of us think about, especially now with both political parties being held hostage by extremists, with neither side listening to the other and with both deliberately misinterpreting what is being proposed; with hatred pervading our elite universities, as seen in a rise of anti-Semitism; and with both presumed presidential candidates lacking a moral spine. Given our time and place, some thoughts on moral clarity seemed timely.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Moral Clarity”

November 13, 2023

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

“Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear

and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the strength to

confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.”

                                           Natan Sharansky (1948-)

   Soviet dissident and Israeli politician

                                          The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, 2004

 

Critics of “moral clarity” claim the world cannot be divided into good and evil, that there are too many nuances. As well, these critics tell us that the words “moral clarity” suggest exclusionary views, such as that expressed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

 

In my opinion they misunderstand the words, as they assign a moral equivalence based on claimed beliefs. The fact that Nazis justified the extermination of the Jewish people as a means to achieve a pure, Aryan race was an act of pure evil, as was their concept of lebensraum. It was evil that drove Hamas terrorists to parachute in and slaughter Jewish civilians, including children, in the most horrific manner. None of what they did could be compared to Israelis giving Palestinians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before sending in armed forces to ferret out terrorists in tunnels beneath Gaza City’s civilian population. Moral clarity is the ability to think clearly about good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. There are times when wars are fought for good causes. Moral clarity implies the existence and ubiquity of evil.

 

However, among the extreme Left, the words have become pejorative, as they associate them with American conservatives. They link them to Ronald Reagan, whose popularity has never sat well with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, and they were popularized by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, a book that highlighted the tension between good and evil. Moral clarity demands the United States has a strong defense, the ability to confront enemies and support allies.  

 

As Natan Sharansky wrote in the rubric above, the challenge for western democracies is to acknowledge that evil exists. Those living under dictatorships, victims of Ku Klux Klan marauders in the early part of the 20^thCentury, and Jews subject to anti-Semitism today understand how evil infests individuals. In his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through the human heart. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” That each individual, regardless of race or religion, is capable of evil (as well as of goodness) has long been understood by the clergy. When Jesus was asked by His disciples how to pray, He responded with the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer rooted in the Torah and that includes the line “but deliver us from evil.” Yet there are and always have been nations that use evil to motivate their people, like the Nazis in World War II, and China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea today. They claim some group is intent on denigrating their lives so they must be destroyed, as Nazis said of Jews in the 1930s, and that today the Chinese say of the Uyghurs, Russians say of the Ukrainians, and as Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis – say of Israelis. Evil may arise in individuals’ hearts, but it can be manifested in government actions. 

 

In his 1794 book Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments, Joseph Addison wrote: “No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.” It was with that in mind that on November 11, 1997, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, not just about what Germans did to Jews, but of how it happened in a nation noted for its civilization – a country that had been a world leader in art, music, science, and the intellect. “To fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust,” he said, “you must imagine (for it probably happened) that the commandant of Auschwitz or Dachau, when he had finished his day’s work, retired to his apartment to eat a meal that was in the finest good taste, and then to listen, perhaps, to some tender and poignant lieder of Franz Schubert.” Evil can appear swathed in clothes of the benevolent. Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here comes to mind. Because it can.

 

Our Founding Fathers recognized the presence of evil, which is why they designed a government with checks and balances and judicial restraints. It was not designed to be efficient – efficiency was left to the private sector – but to be deliberative, with decisions and laws based on compromise, arrived at through consensus. The nation they created had many imperfections – the existence and persistence of slavery being the most notable. But they also created a country where justice was allowed, albeit slowly, to rise. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That has been true in democracies, where the people have a say in the government under which they live, but it has not been true in much of the world, where rule of law, property rights, free markets, and equal justice do not exist. And even in western democracies, the move toward justice can be uneven.

 

We hear complaints of the wrongs America has committed, and no one can deny that slavery existed, that native populations were killed and/or mistreated, and that limits were placed on who could vote. Those wrongs existed but were corrected. Time and history must be considered, and credit must be granted for adaption to change. Man was not created pure and good, and neither were nations, but both should be measured on how they adapt over time. Man first appeared perhaps 300,000 years ago. For most of that time he was tribal. It took thousands of years for him to begin living in communities and cities. Survival meant constant wars, and the defeated were often enslaved. Progress was slow and uneven, as we know from earlier civilizations that flourished and disappeared. We who are alive today are fortunate to live where and when we do. Are not Americans better off today than a hundred years ago? And were not most Americans better off in 1923 than in 1823. And were not Americans in 1823 better off than colonialists in 1723? It is not just standards of living that have improved over time, it is that freedom, gradually, was extended to more people – at first to those of non-European heritage, to non-property owners, and then to blacks and women.

 

But we cannot be complacent. As Ronald Reagan once said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same…” We should respect this exceptional nation that has lived more closely to dictates of moral clarity than most others. But we should not boast of our fortune. Like religion, we do not have to carry patriotism on our sleeves, but we should not forget that we are an example for the oppressed and dispossessed across the world. We should never be ashamed of who we are.

 

Rape, murder, incest, torture, and robbery are evil in every culture. They and the seven cardinal sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth – are the antithesis of moral clarity. We must restrain the evil that is present in each of us and promote the good, which is also within us. Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as moral clarity. It is not a catch phrase or a figment of the imagination. The path toward moral clarity is not always clear. It may be disguised and hard to distinguish; it may be elusive. But, as Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography, we know it when we see it. Most important, it is a code to live by. 

"'Night' by Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Night, Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil”

August 31, 2023

 

“Nobody had any strength left. And the night seemed endless.”

                                                                                                                                              Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                                              Night, 1958

 

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

 

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

 

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America. 

 

Things were worse in the 20^th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold. 

 

Why? There is no answer. How did Austro-Germany, countries that produced Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Albrecht Dürer produce an Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Why do people have so little regard for the sanctity of life that they will torture, mutilate and kill? Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (the SS) established twenty-five main concentration camps, with over a thousand satellite camps. While still confined to the ghetto, Wiesel wrote: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate...” 

 

Once at Auschwitz, death was omnipresent: “Death was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.” As the Soviets advanced westward in late 1944, surviving prisoners from Auschwitz were force-walked most of the four hundred and twenty-five miles west to Buchenwald. More than half died on the way. Shortly after their arrival, Wiesel’s father died in January 1945. Three months later, on April 10, Americans arrived. Survivors were saved, but at what cost: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

 

This is a short but powerful book. It is still read in some high schools, as it should be, for its message is one we should never forget. But it should also be a reminder that evil lurks everywhere. It is why we need religion and their moral codes of conduct. Evil infested Tailei Qi, the shooter this week on the UNC campus. It is with us today in many parts of China (the treatment of Uyghurs in China’s northwest); in Russia (Prigozhin’s death was no accident). It is visible in Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We ask again, ‘Why?’. Remembering his own time in the World War I trenches, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Ring, has Frodo say to Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the life that is given us.” Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. We must play with the cards we are dealt.

 

We cannot deny evil’s existence. In recent years, we in the West have been fortunate. Democracy and free market capitalism give power to the people, not the state. Evil nations reflect excessive powers granted to, or usurped by, governmental workers. Our Founders, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief that man was inherently good, recognized man’s capacity for evil, so they gave us a federal government with limited powers, with separate but equal branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – separate entities that make, execute, and interpret laws. Nevertheless, the desire by individuals to garner power persists; it is gradual and subtle and has become common in Washington. Evil takes root with a promise to do good, which justifies whatever insidious means are necessary to achieve a desired end. And the silence of good people abets its advance. 

 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was directed at the rise of Fascism and was a warning that no nation or civilization is immune from authoritarianism. Today, while we must remain vigilant of right-wing extremists, we should not ignore the fact that most of the Twentieth Century’s murderous regimes emanated from the left – from communist governments that control the media, along with the educational, cultural, economic, and personal lives of their people. 

 

A re-reading of Elie Wiesel’s classic tale Night is a reminder that evil is real, it is pervasive, and it is contagious. It must be confronted, from whichever direction it comes and in whatever guise it appears.

"It Can Happen Here, But Not for the Reasons You Might Think"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“It Can Happen Here, But Not for the Reasons You Might Think”

January 13. 2022

 

“History balances the frustration of ‘how far we have to go,’ with the satisfaction

of ‘how far we have to come.’ It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings

and imperfections, which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.”

                                                                                                                Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907-1998)

                                                                                                               Associate Justice, Supreme Court, 1971-1987

 

In 1935, while Nazism and Fascism swept across Europe, Sinclair Lewis published a novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.” The story was based on Huey Long, then governor of Louisiana. It tells the story of how “Buzz” Windrip, running on a populist platform and portraying himself as a champion of traditional values, defeats FDR at the Democratic convention and then goes on to win the 1936 election for President. He soon takes complete control of government and, with a paramilitary force, like that of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s, he imposes totalitarian rule.

 

Is Lewis’ story a lesson for today? Despite accusations from Democrats, I suspect the threat to democracy is more likely to emerge from left field. As Gerard Baker put it in Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal, regarding Democrats’ desire to preserve political power as we head toward the mid-terms: “…the identification of the domestic opposition as a seditious enemy may be their last, best hope of salvaging something.” After a failed start to his Presidency, it is all Mr. Biden has left.

 

There is a natural tendency to look to the past as a guide for dealing with today and tomorrow. Professor George Santayana (1863-1952), in his 1905 book Reason in Common Sense, warned: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Wise advice, but perspective is also needed. Politics is a competitive sport, appealing to many who make it their life’s work. Power, prestige and money are on the line. It was unsurprising when outsider Donald Trump, acting as a populist and portraying himself as a patriot and champion of middle-American values, was deemed a threat to democracy. He was narcissistic and loose with facts, and he fed off the resentment of many middle-Americans toward coastal elitists who dominate Washington’s bureaucracies, especially its intelligence agencies, run universities, manage media and entertainment companies, professional sports, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But was Trump a threat to our democratic system? I think not. Too many forces were assembled against him.

 

While history teaches us what did happen, it is not a fool-proof forecaster of what is to come. Evil does not always appear in the same guise or enter through the same gate. Threats to democracy can come from other directions. An (unintended?) consequence of today’s schools and colleges emphasis on pedagogy, rather than creating a foundation for students based on the classics, civics, literature and history, is that teachers, professors and administrators have actively censored conservative thought, while they have instilled left-wing propaganda. Democracy is best defended when schools and universities encourage open debate, sprinkled with skepticism while encouraging individual thought. “Blind belief in authority,” wrote Albert Einstein in a 1901 letter, “is the greatest enemy of truth.”

 

Ours is the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. We have lasted because diversity of opinions had been allowed in our schools, colleges and legislative bodies. We remained strong because of the founders’ emphasis on debate and restraint, rather than on mandates and self-indulgence. We became wealthy because free markets rewarded merit, rather than connections. Today, with conformity in and disagreements out, opinions that do not hew to a prescribed agenda are denied. Merit has been replaced with quotas. The use of Executive Orders has surged, with the pandemic as justification, and some Democrats want to kill the filibuster, do away with the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court and they question the Constitutional requirement that all states, regardless of size, have an equal number of U.S. Senators. In the lexicon of the woke, diversity is defined as race, ethnicity and gender. Equity refers to equivalence in outcomes, not opportunities, and inclusion means racial and gender balance. 

 

Democrat leadership have been telling us that the Republican Party has become radicalized against democracy, yet the ramparts are well-manned against right-wing uprisings – by our Constitution, the military and mainstream media. Instead, real risks to democracy are more subtle. They stem from the growth of the administrative state, where Congress has delegated legislative powers to agencies populated with unelected bureaucrats. Risks are fueled by social media platforms that cancel the accounts of those they dislike and result from military officers who, against convention and rules, side with political parties. Risks come from open borders that let in those who come not for opportunity, but for the freebies the U.S. offers. Risks to democracy come from the erosion of individual rights and from the tribal desire to segregate people by race and gender, and from a growing dependency on the state. It is this doctrinal, religious-like allegiance to woke beliefs that threatens our democracy. And mainstream media is silent.

 

Democracy assumes a belief in the collective wisdom of the people, that they are capable of self-government. The United States has the most diverse population, in terms of race and ethnicities, of any country on Earth, with between 350 and 420 languages spoken. Yet, the country has been a melting pot, as millions of immigrants from myriad backgrounds who came her, learned English, assimilated, intermarried and became Americanized. They emigrated to the U.S. because of the freedom and opportunity to better themselves, not to be compartmentalized by racial, ethnic or sexual identity. While they had pride in their heritages, it was their desire to become proud citizens of the most successful country the world has ever seen that made the United States what it is. This we must preserve if we want to save our democracy. Democracy is not meant to be efficient; it is meant to be fair, to offer opportunity to those willing to make the effort and to reward merit. It is a system where character is more important than race. 

 

President Reagan used to warn about the fragility of democracy – of how it could be lost in a generation. And that remains possible, but I believe our democracy is resilient. It has withstood difficult challenges over the course of its first 233 years – from tax rebellions in its early years, to a Civil War, bank runs, two World Wars, the Depression and an attack on its homeland by Muslim Extremists. But that does not mean we can rest on our laurels. Given the woke orthodoxy of Progressives, we must be vigilant. The foundation of our democracy is a universal liberal public-school education that is open to competition and to all opinions. Democracy demands the freedom and self-reliance of the individual, along with the acknowledgement of his God-given rights – it is a system we should cherish, must never forget and certainly not lose.

"November's Election - None of the Above?"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“November’s Election – None of the Above?”

July 4, 2020

“A wise man makes his own decisions.

An ignorant man follows public opinion.”

                                                                                                Chinese Proverb

On a multiple-choice test “none of the above’ may be a legitimate response. But no matter how tempting that answer may seem to voters sick and tired of politics, such a response on November 3, 2020 is not acceptable. As we celebrate our country’s 244^th birthday, we should consider the critical importance of the election four months out.

While no politician is the paragon of virtue drawn by Parson Weems of an idealized George Washington, character has slipped down the scale of traits we treasure when electing leaders. In 2020, we will be offered a choice between a man whose thin skin exposes a large ego, and a man whose intellectual capacity wanes as his defects wax. Mr. Trump’s flaws are well publicized – orange hair, ungrammatical speech, his volatility and personal insecurity seen in his untempered Tweets and his apparent admiration for dictators. But they are all superficial. No matter his appeasing words about Putin and Xi Jinping, he has been tougher on Russia and China than his predecessors. His dyed hair and manner of speaking may offend those raised in coastal, elitist families, but they are far less damaging to democracy than was the misuse of intelligence services by the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration in undermining a freely elected President. Charges of corruption against Mr. Trump have been investigated for four years by a zealous press, a partisan House, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a complicit FBI. They came to naught. On the other hand, mainstream media has been largely silent on financial favors sought by Mr. Biden for his son in Ukraine and China and on his alleged sexual assault on a staff member.

Nevertheless, and despite the impurity of both candidates, the single most important factor in this election has been the hijacking of the Democrat Party by illiberal, so-called “progressives.” Professor Wilfred McClay of the University of Oklahoma described the random and willful destruction of statues, acts condoned by many city mayors: “…these acts of destruction are acts of pure, unmitigated hate…,” hatred not dissimilar in its intensity to that levied against President Trump by the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Unless new leaders come forth,” wrote Heather MacDonald in City Journal this past week, “who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster.”

This wanton destruction reflects George Orwell’s third slogan, “Ignorance is Strength,” that the past is what our leaders tell us it is, not historical facts. Such ignorance ignores the truth in what Thomas Sowell wrote two days ago: “History is what happened, not what we wished had happened.” This nescience reflects abandonment of the humanities by our universities and the life lessons taught therein. The recent anarchy and deaths in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area would not have surprised those familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and those who had studied Robespierre and his Jacobin Reign of Terror in 1793 Paris. 

Polarization has become the norm, but in an election year it is exaggerated. Common sense about distancing, hygiene and the wearing of masks has given way to political diktats. While mainstream media has been filled with scare stories of rising new infections in states that did not lockdown sufficiently or opened prematurely, they have back-paged declining deaths from the virus across the country. Protesters of draconian lockdown rules have been blamed for infecting fellow citizens, yet those who march mask-less with Black Lives Matter (BLM) are exempted. It is okay to spread the virus if you are marching for “social justice,” but not if you are marching for your rights as a citizen. Despite ominous headlines about the virus, there has been some good news. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dr. Joseph Ladapo of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine wrote “…there has not been a single confirmed case of reinfection among the 10 million cases of Covid-19 world-wide, according to a May report in the Journal of the American Medical Association” – a positive piece of news, supporting herd immunity, that has largely gone unreported.

The campaigns must deal with the fact that we are in the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression – bad for the President but opportunity for his opponent. The media, urban and suburban elitists – those with little concept of what the recession and closing of schools have done to average families – have greeted the news with schadenfreude-like glee. Most continue to work from home offices, inconvenienced but not economically deprived. History-challenged politicians, university and school heads and business CEOs have agreed to the assertion that the U.S. is systemically racist. Millions of dollars have flowed into the coffers of BLM, which calls for the defunding of police and whose website (since removed) described the U.S. as a “corrupt democracy originally built on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery [that] thrives today on the brutal exploitation of people of color.”  This mob of ignoramuses have no knowledge of history; they ignore failing schools and Black-on-Black killings in inner cities; they have forgotten (or never knew of) advances in civil rights over the past half century and are blind to the economic gains made by Blacks in the last two years of the Trump Administration. “They are,” as Communist expert and author Trevor Loudon wrote about BLM, “following the line of the Chinese Cultural Revolution… that toppled statues and desecrated monuments.” “It’s hard to find precedents for a civilization turning on itself with such fury,” said Heather MacDonald in an interview with The Epoch Times.

And yet, and yet, there may be a reaction to this madness – perhaps an over-reaction. Leaders at BLM may have over-played their hand. Just as Extinction Rebellion’s shutting down of London in October 2019 was an over-reach by extremists in the climate wars, the lack of wisdom shown by officials in Seattle to CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) may come to signify the height of political idiocy. The London episode led to Michael Shellenberger’s writing Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a commonsensical look at our changing climate. It is too early to say if some member of the “progressive” Left will, likewise, exchange advocacy and propaganda for reason and facts, as they pertain to the issue of race. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. “Jim Crow” laws were enacted by white, southern Democrats in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries in excessive response to North-imposed Reconstruction, which provided needed assistance to former slaves but humiliated whites. When a pendulum is moved beyond its usual arc, it does not revert to its normal, central position. It Can’t Happen Here was a satirical play written by Sinclair Lewis in 1935. It was based on the rise of National Socialism in Europe. To believe that America today could not fall victim to authoritarian terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa is to be blind to the fact that schools, universities, media and corporations have already acquiesced to their demands. Democracy shuts down one door at a time.

The election is four months out. With the choice being an undisciplined Mr. Trump or a cognitively impaired Mr. Biden, the temptation may be to check off None of the Above. Such a decision is okay if one is offered a rotten apple or a spoiled banana, but that is never the right verdict in an election. Sometimes we must vote for the least bad candidate but choose we must. This time the choice should be easy. It is the Party, not the candidate. Democrats have become radicalized to a degree unthinkable a few months ago. Daniel Henninger wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that “this will be a revolutionary election.” Perhaps, but not revolutionary in the spirit of 1776. This time the “revolutionaries” are more interested in destruction than creation. Gone is the land of opportunity; the future they offer is nihilistic.